Just Doing What I Love To Do

I haven't been out with my camera for a long, long time.  Here is one that I took shortly before the walls closed in around us due to the covid outbreak. I'm going to need a new macro for my Nikon camera.  Then I can take photos of little tiny things or parts of things, something that I think I would really enjoy doing.  Perhaps a 1x1 centimetre section of a water painting...oh yes!  I bought it a little over three years ago shortly before being diagnosed with the gigantic aortic aneurysm that changed my whole life.  While I've used it, I haven't gone at it like I did BA (before Aneurysm).  I do love this photo!  Note to self:  get back into it!

Now that it's possible to go outside and mess around a bit, I really have no excuse, except perhaps that the N95 mask gets in the way when I raise the camera to my eye.  Never have been one to look at the picture on the screen, that just feels wrong.  Not to mention, it reduces the length of battery life.

Love to crochet, and have long since run out of people to give blankets to.  I have a line on an organization that gives hand made blankets to kids in some sort of need.  I hope they have a branch here, because I have plenty of yarn just waiting to be used.

It's a meditation.  It's calming.  It produces something lovely and useful.  It allows sitting and watching a movie on television NOT seem like wasted time.

The two photos above are small bits of the blanket most recently finished.  I've joined yarn leftover from other projects into massive balls for several years now.  I use a method called a Russian join that gives me a more or less invisible join between the two ends.  Just a bit of thickness when you crochet past the join, that melts into invisibility as you move on.  I think of this as the blanket of many colors, which it most certainly is.  This is a bedspread for my queen sized bed.  It's gorgeous!  I love it!  And it is entirely too hot to put on the bed in the middle of summer.  Will post a picture once I do.

Here are a few of the balls of yarn, with a tv remote alongside so that you can see how big they are.  Sometime back I tried to take a picture of the work in progress...Chloe claimed the spot of hers and commenced a kitty bath before I could get the picture.  She lost no time at all!  

Couple of photos I took in my little apartment deck garden a year or two ago.  Love!

Love to ride, lovely hired horse who was actually fairly cooperative and didn't try to return to stable too often.  Drizzly kind of NW Washington day...we had scheduled a hayride for a group of developmentally delayed adults, and what with extra staff and participants it turned out we were one person to many for the wagon.  Someone had to ride a horse, and I didn't even have to fight for it!  I would have.  In my book, drizzle does not count as rain.  Just put on a hat and move on.  What a great day!

Once I began painting again, I rediscovered a box of very nice tubes of paint (when I first published this blog I found I had written 'pain' instead of 'paint'.  I almost left it) stashed in the dim recesses of my closet.  All of them were fine except the Da Vinci manganese violet.  The top swatch here is what came out of that old tube.  The bottom is what it really should look like.  I wrote to Da Vinci and asked what had caused the degradation of the first tube.  And that it definitely was old paint and that I wasn't after a replacement, just wanted to know why.  They kindly insisted on replacing it, and thank you very much!  It's so lovely to have it back.  As to the answer to my question, it was basically that with this type of paint, it happens.

Not a WIP anymore, I did a wash on this, dropping in bits of colors that I love at the moment (of course including metallic colors, I'm cannot help myself, it may be diagnostic of something or other).  Maybe it was the three hundred or so Grateful Dead concerts....

The bead work is something  else I do and when I ran across this one I thought it rather belonged in the middle of this piece.  Don't know if I will permanently attach it...but I might.

In addition the the format dumbing down that blogger has done on this new version, I have discovered that spell check, of all things! has gone missing.  Thanks, Blogger (not).

In The Land of Ancient Doodles

I knew these existed somewhere in my files, from the days of yore (90's to mere mortals).  All created during interminable meetings that are called PCP's (Person Centered Plans) in today's lingo.  It's not that they are boring, exactly.  The sedate cadence of voices in any meeting of this type plus the two hours they often last, has been known to put me right to sleep, especially since my part (Occupational Therapy) was perhaps 5% of the whole.   Doodling is how I used to stay awake, by engaging that artistic part of my mind.  I never missed a beat when addressed during these meetings, which surprised some.  I started drawing a portrait of the person who was the focus of the meeting and giving them to either that person or a member of their family.  I only have one, the first and worst, unfortunately.  Even so, I took one look at it and knew exactly who it was.  I have a 36 year old daughter developmental delays so these meetings might not be as frequent but they still come around...

And I still doodle to stay awake.  A selection from the old days:

I'm going to post this WIP as well.  Interesting juxtaposition.  And then I remembered this piece of beadwork I made a year or so ago and just plopped it onto the page.  It works!  It shall be incorporated...somehow.

Just checking here to see what the font size entitled "large" actually is.' I was hoping for the old fashioned numbered system instead of the five size choices that is the default. I've been dumbed down again.  Sigh.  Those who have read any of my current writing are probably thinking that is just as well.  But it is decidedly NOT.  But who cares at this moment.  Blogger is asking for feedback on the new system, so as this is my first time using it, I'll start and list now...

Print size examples created in Open Office:

This is 10.5. Hell, no.

This is 'Normal'.  Do you, do you, do you believe it?  Good lord, no.

This is 12. No.

This is 13. Better..

This is 14. About right.  Will use in Open Office/Word applications, but is not among my choices in the New, Dumbed Down Edition of Blogger.

This is 15. Is good as well.

This 16, which is still smaller that the current blogger category “Large”

This is 18. Looks like Blogger's Large.

Silly people. Let me be the judge of my own Print size.

No ducks today...

Second try at leafy tree thing with negative roots. The first try didn’t realize what size of paper it was on, poor thing. I rather like it, as well as the Rose and upside leaves from the other day.

The gold on the roots came from a brush I “thought” I cleaned. Oops. Liked it though. 

No upside down leaves this time.  I’ll try a landscape next time. 

I tried to post a series about the ducks growing up in our trickle of a creek. Babies swam. Mama walked. For some reason ( likely that the phone I’m doing this entry on is a 6s. When did those come on the scene, five years ago?  Kinda not up to it anymore I guess. Maybe if I win the lottery.  If I remember to enter....

A Rose is a Rose

Here is Ramona’s Rose.  Still taped as it is not quite dry. I don’t work under LED light ever, as it does a number on my brain (headaches, and worse). I guess I will have to get at least one just for taking pictures, because the yellowishness is not there in reality. I am having the hardest time making the edge of the leaves!  I keep trying to paint them backward.

It is a start...

Ps.  Was not kidding about the upside down leaves!  Just when I think the brain injury that happened during a surgery that went sideways, something comes along to remind me that recovery is likely a lifelong process. And that’s ok, because I’m here!  Anyhow.... those darn leaves!

It’s a Journey...

I had thought I would start a new blog in which to post my baby-step paintings done as I learn water painting techniques.  I thought I would start with my first few efforts. I’ve been roaming around YouTube in search of instruction, inspiration and the nerve to dive in. So many painting blogs!  Most that I’ve found are so, for want of a better word, normal. Sedate. Traditional. Sort of a “here is how it is done. Do it that way”. Which is fine, just not really for me. Deadhead to the core, I’ve been coloring outside the lines for many years now.

As I meandered through YouTube, I came across https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45GWRjE47PU&feature=share aka creationsceecee. I will figure out how to make the blog name BE the hyperlink another time. Her approach to her art sings to me, and besides, I am addicted gold, shiny paint myself. So it works.

But I digress. This blog is now resurrected after it’s one post debut a year ago. I mentioned my brain injury in that one post, and this makes me chuckle in a rueful sort of way. I forgot I started this blog or made that post. When I found it today I had a “oh yeahhhhhh, I remember” moment.  The blog title works for my present purpose, which is basically a place to post these painting exercises as I do them.

So I’m having a crack at the easy stuff for beginners. And here are my first pieces.

The page of leaves.  Part way through I got distracted by what gold does when you drop it onto the wet leaf that I gave up any pretense of doodling..... 

 I did something with the little houses but it wants to be more than what it is right now. Am on the third edition, but it’s not right either. So I’ll just keep at that one until it is what i want it to be. Think Malvina Reynolds (Who I heard sing at Kepler’s Bookstore) and even talked to her a little bit as an awestruck teenager) and you’ll be on the right track.

Keeping that one to myself for now, I give you those floaty little flower blobs with gold around the edges from a few days ago. I was staying on track quite nicely until I saw how the new gold paint I got yesterday kind of swept beautifully in across the yellow on those two orange blobbies  in the upper left. Pretty cool. Then I remembered how I used to doodle rudbeckia type flowers, and very nice. It was past midnight by this time. At least it was when I woke up with a crick in my neck and a dry paint brush in my hand.

So, this morning I got up and did this one.  First the rudbeckias and oh how I love them.  Then some blobbies to play around with. Then back to rudbeckia with some dots to balance it out.

Thought I would mention.  I have been looking for some sort of painting journal, not to expensive hopefully when I ran across these Arteza ones on Amazon. Three books of 30 pages each seems like a great deal.  I hope the quality is fine because, at one painting a day (hopefully) that is three months of paintings, lol.

And I bid you goodnight.