I Finished The Fish

The glue is dry and all of the scales are kind of where I want them to be so my two-page spread that started with a sponge pained fish negative is now finished. I copied something that the teacher did in her demo sketchbook but I'm a beginner so I get to copy her and she only painted the border not sponge painted it like I did so I was original in that. Not that I need to defend myself but...

I interrupted my yoga this morning to snap a quick photo of a Nuthatch at the suet pellets. I don't know why I'm so excited when I see a Nuthatch but I really like to see them at the feeders.

I learned a new way to draw birds from the Illustrated Life Journal teacher so I transferred that to my watercolor sketchbook class and added some of her style of birds today. I like that I get to use a black pen to add details. I'm way better with a pen than a tiny little paintbrush for putting in eyes and feathers and such. Our theme for this page and the ones before and after is "flying things." Later in the sketchbook it's "swimming things." I have a lot more blank pages to play with.

This afternoon I went totally off course and painted a landscape using one of the photographs from a dive trip that I pulled out to use for color palettes. It took me about an hour to paint because I used a hair dryer to dry the paint between colors. I used my trusty sea sponge to paint the leaves and the bougainvillea flowers. It's my first landscape painting and I like the way it turned out.

Once again I used my daily Illustrated Journal page as a substitute for drawing out of a book. I'm finding it satisfying to make a little list of things that I'm grateful for and then spend time at the end of the day drawing little pictures and writing little captions. The next lesson is to draw what you eat for a whole day. I think I'll wait to have a few more gratitude pages under my belt before I tackle that one. Maybe I'll wait for a day when I eat simple-to-draw things. Too bad I'm out of soup.

Tonight is Friday Night Knitting and I added about 4" to the Andean Sun Hat. I only got off course a few times, but caught it fairly quickly, and was able to back up and fix my booboos. Once the brim is done the pattern for the rest of the hat is on a chart, not written out step by step. It's been a long time since I used a chart and I'm a little nervous about it but I know I can figure it out.

Today's toss was a container of moldy cream cheese. It's not supposed to have pink spots on it. Blech.

We had gentle snow all day long. Somebody said she thought that it added up to about an inch. I'm debating whether to go out tomorrow and shovel or just wait for above freezing temps which are supposed to come on Tuesday. Hm. I'll see how I feel in the morning.

Sorry about all the art today. It's all I want to do these days and, being retired, I can do what I want. Luxurious.

--Barbara