Back to the drawing board

It’s July 4th and I may be the only person in the U.S. not hanging out with friends, cooking out and watching the fireworks. I took having a day off seriously this year. Life has been non-stop for about three months now and I have been pulling 10-12 hour work days, then working in the garden in what little time I’ve had off. It was starting to catch up with me and I pretty much collapsed yesterday.

So today I gave myself a 24 hour vacation. My son and daughter have gone to the lake with friends, my boyfriend has gone back to work after six months of medical leave and it has been just me and the dog. It has taken me about a year of being an empty nester to get used to having time off for myself. Finally I’m beginning to get used to it.

So, what have I done on my day off? I slept late. Late being 8 am, but compared to my 5 or 6 am that’s a luxury. I decided to make it an art day not a clean-the-house day. It has probably been 25 years since I took a life drawing class. Recently I discovered that there is a website, pixelovely.com, that has life drawing complete with the warm up gesture drawings.  So here is what I did this morning.

This one was an 11 minute pose.  It was a very complex pose and I pretty much missed getting it right so I decided to concentrate on her face instead.

This one was a 30 minute pose and it came out ok considering how long it’s been since I did this kind of work.

I also worked on a painting that I have had sitting in my bedroom floor for months now.  I have learned that if I put a project where I have to step over it or move it constantly I will eventually get aggravated enough to finish it.  This has been that sort of project.  I’m reusing a canvas (because I’m cheap) so it had issues to begin with, but I just wanted a cheerful painting to brighten up my bedroom.  This is the middleish stage.

I worked on it for about 2 hours and now I’m at the “hate it” stage.  Does anyone else have this problem? You get in the middle of a piece that you were all excited to start on and suddenly you hate it.   I threw away many, many pieces of artwork until I realized if I would just step away from it for awhile (sometimes a very, very long while) when I came back it wasn’t as bad as I left it.  That must be what my Fairy Godmother does, because she certainly doesn’ t clean house.   I was hoping to finish this over the weekend, but I hate it enough right now to know that it will be at least next weekend before I can face it again.  I’m really tired of stepping over the darn thing.  If it gets finished and not thrown in the dumpster, I will post the finished piece.

One last thing I have managed on my day off (besides the fact I actually cleaned my kitchen since my Fairy Godmother won’t) is to start a drawing that has been floating around in my head for a graduation gift for one of my “adopted” kids.  Thank goodness I don’t have to send all the kids I claim as mine to college.  This is a special friend who started out as a close friend of my son and eventually I just considered her one of mine and adopted her whole family as well.  The drawing is just a sketch and I’m going upstairs now to work on it and turn on the window air conditioner so my dog doesn’t freak out over the fireworks that are beginning to pop around the neighborhood.

I hope you all have had as relaxing a July 4th, 2014 as I have.