Busy weekend for me! I think I've finished the painting for my daughter, after several more sessions working on it. I spent time softening the lines of the horse, and worked on the stone wall, both adding detail and softening the edges. The scene is meant to be a bit misty and ethereal and my original lines were too hard and dark. I'm leaving it alone where I can see it for a few days, so that I can look at it and see if anything stands out as needing more work. I do that with most of my paintings. I'll either work on it more, or sign and varnish it next. Here is the current version:
I love a productive weekend! Craig and I spent Saturday cutting out and sanding the pieces for my first Christmas craft. I'm starting out with six of the wood gift baskets, which I will paint. We made these baskets several years ago for family gifts, filled with wine bottles, homemade cookies, and such things. They also look great with a potted poinsettia, books, a crocheted afghan, or other things in them. Here is a photo of the pieces we will assemble next weekend, with one of the original baskets we made.
We did something quite unusual today...we took several hours off and went to a movie. Going to movies used to be something we did frequently, but over the years it's less and less a pastime for Craig and I. Both "kids" went with us...also unusual nowadays...and we saw "Brave".
I really enjoyed it as a story. The heroine Merida is a spunky, strong character, and her relationship with her mother has both the conflict and emotional attachment that many of us experience in growing up. I particularly noted the interesting choices the filmmakers made, in having the backgrounds so realistic that they often looked like real film of nature, yet the characters were cartoonish. Their skin looked plastic, and they looked like dolls. I wonder if that was to better enable merchandising of toys based on the movie. Anyway, it was a fun movie and it was great to get away for awhile.
Best wishes for a good week ahead!
I hope everyone had a good 4th of July. I'm not much into fireworks so I stayed in, while my husband biked to see the city fireworks display. He said it was worth the effort. I had plenty of booming around home with many neighbors setting off their own fireworks. And plenty of barking with my dogs objecting to the booming! So not exactly a quiet night, but at least the neighbors stopped (or ran out of fireworks) by midnight. Maybe they had to get up for work the next morning too!
It's kind of amazing to us that Florida is actually fairly cool compared to many states north of us. The heatwave sounds miserable, especially for the states that are dealing with power outages after the recent storm. And those terrible, destructive fires in the west...really tragic losses for so many. So while it IS hot here, and humid of course, it's the normal Florida summer pattern, and we're getting rainstorms most days to cool us down. We feel fortunate at this point, and hope things improve very soon for the rest of the nation.
I am excited to be starting this weekend to construct the wooden gift baskets I'll be painting for the Christmas season, for my etsy shop. I'm so lucky to have my husband's help! I'm pretty handy with a scroll saw but not so much with a circular saw...we usually do woodworking projects together. I'm planning to make six to begin with, and go on to wood ornaments and other ideas I have. In past years I painted things as Christmas gifts to family and friends, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they do on etsy.
I have been working on my daughter's painting this week and have made good progress. If I have time I'll work on it again this weekend. I feel I need to clear the decks before I get going on the Christmas projects anyway. I love when a painting starts to come together.
I am lucky enough to have three-day weekends every week. Each week I plan all the things I need and want to do in those three days, and it seems like I'll have plenty of time to get everything done. Of course I rarely do. So why do I keep making those long lists and spend each day increasingly frustrated because I'm not getting enough done?
Chores eat up most of my time away from work, leaving little time for exercise, for painting, for developing new creative ideas, and just for down time to recharge my energy and imagination. I remember spending hours just reading, early in my life. I miss that. I miss feeling like I have lots of time. Do you remember long summer days, spent just running around, playing? No "Things to Do" list! Of course, those were the days when I had a mother to take care of all the chores...now I am the mother, the wife, the employee. The buck stops here.
I want to find a way to slow down, but so far I don't know how to do that. I have to fit in who I truly am in the corners and edges of my life, squeezed in around everything I am responsible for. What would it be like to really have enough time? I can only remember back to childhood summers to answer that question. I believe most adults are stressed and too busy in the U.S. these days, so I know I'm not alone in this.
I did make the time to paint for a couple of hours today, so I have a photo of my progress on the horse painting I'm working on. I'm still not happy with the angle of the horse's head & have reworked it a couple of times...I'll get it right soon. Worked more on the clouds and background too. It's coming along, though slowly.
I hope everyone has a good week. Looking forward to an extra day off for the 4th of July. Take care, friends.
