This time on Art Rocks, a local author's short stories about pets and wildlife encourage us to look closer.

And each story stands on its own.

It's great for bedtime reading for kids.

The power and poise of ballet.

It's about the environment we create in the studio and scratch.

Board art and a company that specializes in recreating footwear fashions of days gone by.

When you get a design just right, it is amazing.

These stories are next on Are Rocks.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Janina Marie Fuller loves observing animals.

Our pets, fish, insects, you name it.

Janina loves them all.

Now, Fuller has turned her passion for observing the habits of creatures great and small into a book that she hopes will encourage readers to do the same.

Janina shares the origin story behind her new book, The Gecko in the Bathtub.

The book is called The Gecko in the Bathtub Encounters with Marvelous Creatures.

There are three stories in the book in which the animals are not in the normal context where you would expect to find them.

One is about the hawk on the porch.

One is about a monkey on my head, and the other one is about the gecko in bathtub.

And I knew I wanted the book to have sort of a lighthearted tone.

So I could have called it the monkey on my head, I guess, or the hawk on the porch.

But the title, The Gecko in the Bathtub kind of made me giggle a little bit.

So that's what I went with.

I was going to take a bath one day and I went into the bathroom and looked in the bathtub and there was a gecko.

It surprised me because how did it come up through the pipes?

I didn't think it had come over the top of the bathtub.

It must have come up through the pipes.

But never has there been a time when we've run water in the bathtub or the sinks with the shower and had geckos flood to the surface.

So I still don't know how it got there.

The book is a collection of short stories, and there are anywhere from 2 to 5 or five and a half pages long.

And each story stands on its own.

It's great for bedtime reading for kids.

That's one thing that makes it a great book to read at night.

I think about a third of the chapters come from right around this house balloon.

A moth is a moth that lives in Louisiana.

It's about this big.

I have lived here for several years and never seen one.

And I lived in this property for several years and never seen one.

I walked out on the screen porch one day and there was a Luna moth hanging on the screen and I thought, if I could catch it and release it, then we would get to have more Lynn involved.

But the moth was already deceased.

We still have it.

It's in a little shadow box on the mantle behind us.

The monkey was in Ecuador as my son and I were in route to the biology research station where we were going to stay for a week.

We had the stopover from which we had to pick up a boat, but the boat wasn't coming for about 45 minutes.

We were relaxing at the riverfront and suddenly there was a monkey sitting on my shoulder.

It was up before I could respond, and then it was on my head.

Clearly, this monkey knew how to be around people, so it wasn't really afraid of it, but it also had a lot of teeth.

I was laughing very, very hard.

I had a baseball cap on that monkey was sitting on top of the hat, so if I had leaned over, it would have fallen off my head.

But I didn't think to lean over.

And finally it just jumped off and ran away.

So that was a pretty fun moment.

Also from Ecuador, my son and our bird guide were with me when we saw the monster fish and the mother, Jaguar and her two cubs that were swimming right across the river right in front of our boat.

And there were about 15 of us on the boat and everybody saw them.

Those were quite spectacular experiences because they were so, so, so unexpected.

The story in the Galapagos Islands, this owl standing on top of a volcano in the middle of a hot, dry day with people walking around them and it just didn't care.

It was like something from another world.

And later that day, we were on the same island, but in a different part where there was forest and it was raining.

And we came up on this vermillion flycatcher, and this bird is just this white, vivid, scarlet red that stood out so much against the leaves behind it and the gray sky.

And it was pouring rain.

And the two birds didn't really have anything in common, except they were on the same island and they were both alone.

There is something about that moment when we drove underneath that bird.

It just felt like my dad, who had passed about four years before that, was just reaching down right into my heart and saying, I love you.

I'm here with you.

I'm proud of you.

My brother and sister are quite a bit older than me, and when they were in high school, they had to take a biology class that involved a bird unit, but they weren't old enough to drive.

So my dad drove them on these early morning birding trips on the weekends, and as a little kid, I always wanted to be with the big people, do what they were doing.

So I tagged along and that's how I started to learn how to look at birds.

When I was about nine, I never imagined that I would ever have a caged bird as a pet because I think birds don't belong in cages.

When our friends who were moving begged us to take their love bird because they couldn't take him with them to Hawaii, I couldn't say no.

I knew this bird already because we'd spent so much time at their house.

And then when the mother of my son's friend had baby love birds that she didn't have space for, I took them to.

So I had these four birds and we lived in a small apartment.

The only reasonable place to put them was in my bedroom.

So I had them in the bedroom.

I hung sticks from the ceiling.

I let them out a couple of times a day.

They could fly around, hang out with each other or with me.

I have learned to notice.

I've learned to look for things that I don't expect to see.

I've learned to look around the corners of the windows on the outside to see what might be lurking in there or building a nest there or a web during the day.

This little gray tree frog usually sits above the board, under the porch roof and just sits up there.

Little hidey hall, little cubbyhole.

And then at night we turn the porch light on around dinnertime.

And at nighttime she comes down and she sits on the lion's head.

All right.

On the porch light.

And she eats the bugs that are attracted by the porch light.

She does this little mini migration up and down, up and down.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's still sitting on the lion's head.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's gone.

And then I think she's gone.

And if she's gone, I never know if I'll see her again.

And maybe two, three or even four days go by and then suddenly she's there again.

I do have a relationship with the turtles.

Here's how I think of it.

Animals and these plants, they were all here way long before we were long, long, long before we were.

And I consider it a privilege to live in their space.

So I thank them for allowing me the honor of seeing them when the turtles float up to the surface or swim up and eat the cat kibble that I throw out for them.

I think the hummingbirds that come to our feeders, I think the armadillos, even though they dig holes in our garden, I just think that we need to kind of turn around how we regard our relationship with the plants and animals around us because we're all part of the same system.

And it might be in some danger right now that anything that's out there that's going to eat the mosquitoes is okay with me.

That includes the lizards and the frogs and the spiders.

We have mostly golden orb spiders, some people call them banana spiders because their legs are yellow and their bellies are yellow and they build webs that are gold.

And I thought at first that the gold in their webs was because their webs got pollen on them.

But it's not.

It's in the silk that they weave.

I don't know how they do it.

I don't know enough about them yet, but their webs are architectural masterpieces.

They're very complicated.

There's another kind of spider, the black and yellow garden spider.

There's a chapter in the book about a black and yellow garden spider that I named Charlotte, who is right outside our kitchen window.

A few years ago.

And I'm sure she was there long before I found her.

She was one of my teachers in learning to look carefully at what's out there all the time, because you never know who's going to show up.

When I only got to be in her presence for about six days and then she disappeared.

But thankfully, there's another black and yellow garden spider that we just found this morning on the back side of the house.

And part of the point that I want to make in the book is that you don't have to be a scientist.

You don't have to have a background in biology.

The planet belongs to all of us, and we occupy it with all of these animals and the plants that support them and us.

And we're all connected in ways that we can't fathom because we're human.

We're used to approaching the world around us like we're in charge.

We can control whatever we need to, whatever we want to.

And if we just shift that a little bit to This is the world I'm in, how can I support the life of the world that I'm in, including mine?

Because we're all wrapped up in the same web of life and how that life goes, we go.

A friend of mine put it this way after she had read this book, she said, It's like a love story.

There's humor and there's a lot of lightheartedness.

But there are also places where it goes kind of deep.

And the feeling that I have for these creatures and the plants that support them is deep.

Want more?

You can follow.

Janine is writing by Googling Janina Marie Full Up blog.

Look at just a few of the arts events happening here in Louisiana in coming days, you'll find a hefty a hole in the current edition of Country Roads magazine or online at Country Roads mag dot com.

To see or to share in the episode of Art Rocks Again Visit LP Dawgs Art Rocks.

You'll also find plenty of segments on LP B's, YouTube channel.

Over on the left coast.

California's Sacramento Ballet got its start in 1954, and the Troops productions have left a lasting impact on the world of dance.

Now we're about to get a behind the scenes look at how a ballet company goes about choreographing a piece for the stage and what.

There are things on the planet that are difficult to put into words, and to me, dance and music can fill the spaces that sometimes words cannot.

What I want to do is to challenge people's preconceptions of what ballet is.

This is a phenomenal organization.

Over 60 years in this community, building dancers, building audiences.

It's pretty fantastic to think that I am running the company that I used to dance for.

I have always wanted to direct.

I have wanted to do that since I was a young dancer.

I felt like I'd been training my whole life for this job, and I felt good.

So I made A World from The Nutcracker this year, which is the biggest artistic project I'd ever taken on people very strong opinions about Nutcracker.

It's a very intimidating thing to step into.

But, you know, as a choreographer, you want to put your stamp on something.

So being able to do that was huge.

I actually started hearing the music differently.

Dance is physical and embodiment of the music, so if I can take whatever I'm hearing, find the intention to it and put it in the physical form.

It's about the environment we create in the studio.

It's about the support these artists have for each other and what they create every day.

Having dancers who are willing to take the leap with you is essential.

I talk with the dancers often about Don't Chase the Dragon.

You had a you had a great show last night.

Don't try to recreate it.

What's going to be new tonight?

How would you go somewhere else?

Where else can you explore?

When you're creating like that, it feels effortless.

You're not struggling.

You're in your creative zone.

It's just crazy because some days it all just works, and some days it doesn't.

There's a saying that if every thing you do works, you're not trying hard enough.

So you need to be able to create and fail because you might learn something incredibly valuable that takes you to the next place that you can't get to without that little failure.

Scratch border that dates back to the 19th century.

The artist would create engravings by scratching through a surface layer of black ink to reveal the underlying white pigment below.

Here's how it's done.

I think most people don't realize how long it takes to do some scratch bird artists are very quick, but the process that I use takes a long time and I usually set goals like a couple of square inches per day that work very close with the very sharp knife and do extreme detail.

It's a very satisfying art form.

It's immediate.

It's very much like drawing in that sense.

You know, you put the lines down and there it is.

People have said to me, Oh, I'd love to watch you do Scratch Bird.

And I say, I can't think of anything more boring than watching me do scratch part because I'm so slow.

It's like watching grass grow or paint dry, but it is a fun thing to do, even if you're not good at it.

It's just kind of fun to scratch off that black ink and watch them the way they appear.

And you can do some pretty neat effects with it once you start to learn how to use it.

It's like drawing with a knife instead of a pencil.

You're starting with black ink and removing it to get to the white.

But how close to the lines or place, how thick or thin they are, give you different values of different looks.

You can also get these boards without the black ink, so it's just white clay and you can add your own ink.

And some people using some people have use watercolor.

And then you can do the same type of scratching techniques.

And that gives you a different look than the traditional black scratch board.

Supplies are fairly minimal.

You can work with a knife and a scratch board.

That's all you really need.

There are a lot of different kinds of tools that will give you a different textures and lines.

People have used exactly knives, but scalpel blades, which are very good at cutting skin, are also very good for creating probably the finest lines that you can get.

People have also found that tattoo needles work very well.

I like the flat needles or five or nine little needles in parallel, and they allow you to gently remove the black and so you can get different levels of gray more easily with them.

When I first started doing it, I was involved in cave exploring and it was a medium that to me really portrayed the deep black shadows and bright highlights that you see in caves very well, and also allowed me to do a lot of detail in the geology, you know, drawing the rocks.

I could get very fine detail with scratch, but as I grew to like the medium, I started noticing its affinity to much older engravings that you would see in old zoology textbooks from the 19th century.

I just love the line work and those and Scratch Gourd was very similar in a lot of ways.

And having an interest in animals, especially reptile scratch sport, was a great medium for me to use.

I like to do very realistic, authentic images of animals, and in order to do that, I need photographs.

Scratch word is a very slow medium, so you can't really take it out into the field and sketch with it like you would with graphite or with paints.

Because when I do animals like a crocodile, I don't copy the photographs exactly.

But I do need them to make sure I have the right number of scales in the right places and so on.

I kind of like everything.

I'm a bit eclectic.

I've done portraits.

I've done animals, done a fair number of birds, done mountain scenes.

I've done a lot of architectural subjects.

My most common size is eight by ten inches or five by seven.

I've also done 18 by 24, which are fairly large, and the first time I did a really large board, I said, Oh, I'm going to make the smallest four.

And I did a little one by one and a fourth inch board with an owl on it.

One question I get a lot is, well, how do you get color on the board underneath?

And the answer is no.

If it's a blackboard, it's white underneath.

But after you've scratched away the black, you can come in with a W anchor watercolor on.

I got a degree in fine art from the University of Cincinnati.

I was trained as a painter, and I discovered scratch board about 20 years ago and have been doing it ever since.

I emphasize authenticity a lot, but I also want to be a good artist.

And for me, underneath every good realist painting, there's a good abstract and you still have to have that sense of design.

And I've been trying to combine the two into doing the best scratch bird art I can, and I have achieved a master status in the International Society of Scratch Bird Artists.

We emphasize international, even though most of the members are from the US and another large chunk are from Canada.

We've been getting more and more artists from other countries.

I thought it be great to have Cincinnati area exposed to scratch bought art.

I was the exhibition director for Middletown Art Center Exhibition last May.

They have a really nice gallery space that could hold 80 to 90 works.

Then we had two days of we call them workshops or a little bit more demonstrations.

We also have our annual membership meeting and we have what's called Ask the Masters.

Some of our master members who are our most talented members do a little panel and answer questions around what they do, how they do it, offer advice.

It's a chance to learn from each other.

It's a way to both network and build relationships, but also.

Learn.

And try out something.

Lots of people love adding a little vintage touch to their wardrobe.

If you like that, look in shoes.

Consider the work of the American Duchess Company based in Reno, Nevada.

American Duchess creates historically accurate shoes in styles dating from the 1700s to the 1940s.

So put your feet up and watch while we try walking a mile in our forebears shoes.

American Duchess is a small company that makes new old shoes.

We take a really old design, something you see in a painting or at a museum, and we make it work for modern wear and comfort expectations.

Everything from the 18th century, 19th century and 1920s, thirties and forties as well.

American That's just started as my personal blog on historic costuming.

I liked to make things.

I make those things for myself and wear them to an event, a picnic or a dance.

It's just what I did for fun.

And I thought, I'll blog about my experiences so that other people who have no idea how to make a wig or how to do this dress can learn from my mistakes.

And it's always been about sharing my mistakes and learning that way.

You don't want to put all this time and effort and sometimes a lot of money into your beautiful dress and then have no shoes to wear with it because it crushes the illusion.

When you're creating these gowns.

They are art pieces and if you don't have the right shoes, it just kills it.

And when you take those photos of yourself or someone's taking photos of you and you look at those later, you want to be able to say, I look like I walked out of a portrait.

You're not going to achieve that with tennis shoes under your dress?

Believe me, I've seen it.

Historic shoes are not like shoes today.

They have strange closures.

They have specific toe shapes or lack of toe boxes.

You they're very, very different.

So nobody was really making that kind of thing.

And I thought, well, okay, maybe I'll have a go and make some shoes not by hand.

Couldn't make enough of them to make a living doing that.

So I found a manufacturer and we developed a prototype.

I put it on the Internet and did a preorder to the crowdfunding campaign and it funded overnight.

Like overnight we had enough money to do the production run and it's like, Oh my God, I woke up in the morning like, Oh, oh, this is the thing, okay, I'm going to do this.

This is what I'm going to do.

Our first design was Georgiana, named after the Duchess of Devon shirt.

It was made out of Diable Saturn.

It was our first go.

People were excited about it.

I was excited about it and it worked.

We just kept producing like the next one, the next one, the next one.

A typical 18th century shoe.

The most characteristic hallmarks that you might see on those are lockets with buckles.

So this is the way that 18th century shoes closed.

You have these two straps, you put one strap through here, you stick the prongs through the other one.

You can make them as tight as you want.

You can keep tightening them and it makes your shoes look very pretty.

Historical accuracy is a very, very, very important.

So the basic process starts with looking at original shoes, whether it is photographs.

It's brainstorming.

So we just kind of all get together and go, what sounds cool?

What are we not made before?

What are the trends in the community?

A lot of it is research.

Looking at old magazine ads, catalogs, available shoes in our collections.

I've gone to a number of different museums and study things hands on, so that way I have an understanding of how they're constructed and what goes into the internals of them and things of that nature.

All of that research gets done gradually as we find inspiration, say we need a boot for this time period, and we go and find lots of different examples and pick what ones really speak to us and what we think would translate well to a modern design.

And from there, we do a lot of sketches, a lot of ideations, and then actually come up with the formal line drawing and we put little tiny details of the sole should be this many millimeters, this eyelet should be this many millimeters wide, all the little tiny details in there.

So that way the first sample that we get back is as close as we can get to.

Right.

There is nobody who knows about historic shoes and how to make them better than Nicole Rudolph.

When I was at Colonial Williamsburg, I ended up learning how to do women's shoe making in the proper 18th century style all by hand.

No machines, all hand-stitched and assembled.

We're based here in Reno, and this is where we do all of the design, all the marketing and advertising happens here as well.

We also pack ship and do logistics out of here.

So there's a great big warehouse attached to this little tiny office.

We do everything except the actual manufacture of our footwear.

95% of the world's shoes are made in Georgia.

It is in South China.

There are millions of people in OJ and it's a city that is built for shoe production, factories, components, markets, leather producers, just everything you need.

So that's where we also manufactured our shoes.

The people that we work with there are amazing.

We produce fantastic shoes in China because I get on a plane and I go over there and I make sure our quality processes are in place and that our materials are good and that our relationship with our manufacturer is good.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But that's okay because you can always watch episodes of the show at LP dot org slash art routes.

And meanwhile, Country Roads magazine is a useful resource for discovering thought provoking coverage of events, the arts, people and places all around the state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thank you for watching.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.