Week 70: Adobe Illustrator

Threshing Stones © Karen Thiessen, 2013

Our trip to Copenhagen and Amsterdam has left me inspired and re-energized. I brought a small ecojot sketchbook with oatmeal-coloured pages and filled most of it on the trip and the rest of it last night. In order to deal with the deluge of visual inspiration, every day for 15 days, I fed my sketchbook each evening in the hotel, and sometimes wrote in it in restaurants while waiting for our food. It also kept me occupied during our 20 hours of air travel. A few themes emerged from this sketchbook, one of which is a new project that I am excited about. It's an art/Mennonite material culture involving leaves that I am playing with right now.

Last night I reviewed my Mennonite material culture project sketchbook and saw a threshing stone that I had sketched from a picture that I saw on the Kauffman Museum website a few years ago (no longer on the website). I decided to recreate it in Adobe Illustrator. It took a bit of MacGyvering to make, but Threshing Stones eventually looked like what I had in mind.