It’s time for the studio news for May 2025. Let’s get right to it.
Studio News for May 2025
CP Magic! News
With the June issue of CP Magic!, the magazine got back to the normal format, with a featured artist, tutorial, and other articles.
Gina Leone Middings is the featured artist, and she describes her dual passions of dogs (Dachshunds in particular) and pet portraits. She does other animals, as well, and does them all with the goal of capturing the spirit, as well as the likeness.
Her tutorial is a small dog eye study on Pastelmat, just the kind of project you could devote a weekend to, or do as a learning project.
The June issue is available in digital and print formats.
Artwork
Current Works in Progress
The two pieces I worked on in May were not previous works-in-progress.
The first one is on one of those little scraps of drawing paper I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. This piece was not planned. I simply took out the scrap of paper and began drawing. I used only two colors, and will be writing about it as a step-by-step in a couple of weeks.
The second piece is totally for fun, a coloring page.
But not any ordinary coloring page. I made this pattern by tracing the four different French curves my husband owns. I made the outlines several years ago, but only found it again the last week in May. That day was especially uninspiring art-wise and I had resigned myself to not drawing at all. The moment I saw this, I sat down and started coloring. In two days, I’d worked on it over four hours!
It’s not finished, yet, and I don’t know if I’ll work on it regularly until it is finished. But it’s definitely a fun project and has me thinking thoughts of coloring pages!
ACEOs
I completed only two ACEOs in May.
Both of them were the result of cutting down a larger piece that just wasn’t working for me. After cutting up the larger piece, I spent about an hour on each of the ACEOs, and liked the results a lot better.
Drawing Time for the Month
The goal for drawing time in May was 22 hours. I fell a bit short of that, with 21 hours, 19 minutes for the month. Given the number of other things going on in May, I was glad to get that much drawing time in.
Speaking of other things….
Personal News
Newsletter readers know that I celebrated a birthday in May. My husband asked what I’d like to do, and I told him I wanted a hot dog and ice cream cone. He went me one better by suggesting we take a short road trip to McPherson (Kansas) to visit a Sonic Drive-In. Good deal! I agreed.
The real attraction to this suggestion was taking the back roads there and back. There’s nothing like gravel roads, and fields of wheat and rural scenery.
We took an hour to make the drive by the back roads, and meandered our way back. Total trip: About three hours.
Of course the hot dogs and ice creams were delightful, but the icing on the birthday cake was the batch of photos I took along the way. The combination of storms to the east of us, bright sunshine all around us, and great rural scenery provided a lot of photo ops. I’m looking forward to interpreting some of those images into artwork in the months to come.
Looking to the Future
Major art projects are on hold for the time being. My main computer is in the shop indefinitely, so I’m having to do everything on my husband’s computer (and around his schedule). So far, it’s working out, but it means I can’t easily produce tutorials at the moment. I can scan artwork, but it’s difficult to work at my husband’s work station, so I’m focusing on drawings for myself or for fun, like the drawing page above.
But I can tell you that my work with the drawing page has me thinking about making a line of coloring pages for artists who enjoy that sort of thing on a regular basis or for fun.
What do you think?
That’s the Studio News for May 2025
And that’s all the studio news that’s fit to print.
Here’s looking forward to June. Let’s keep drawing!
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