Feet up. Pencil down.

Yowza, what a couple months it's been!  Gratefully, no serious illness or drama, just lots of office reorganizing, great mountains of farm work and endless house maintenance as we prepare to sell my father-in-law's house.  Art was the forgotten, sullen face at the bottom of the totem pole.  Barely home, I was simply not in sketching mood.  With some rare and annoying exceptions, creative folks live on a roller coaster of "Look what I've been doing.  I'm kicking some sketching/painting/sculpting butt!" then "I don't wanna' draw.  Don't know what to do.  Don't know why I even try.  I suck."  Whiners.

Anyhoo, after the May cycle drawing, I did basically zero art.  Sketchbook Skool Stretching was set aside as life became uber busy - for 2 months.  Then those pesky SBS people came up with Playing - a frolicking class of just plain goofing around with art supplies.  Oh, alright already!  Once again, SBS grabbed me by the ear and pulled me back to the sketchbook.

On July 4, two days prior to class starting, it was time to wake up ye ole art bones.  I've been working through inching through ignoring four of my many art improvement books for awhile: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Drawing Lab, Art Escapes, and One Watercolor a Day.  Can't pick just one.  I excel at indecision.  I grabbed the four, wrote each book's next exercise/project on my white board for all to see, and proceeded to actually do something!  First, Art Escapes - 1 minute sketches in pre-drawn frames took little time and captured itty bits of the studio.  Then, Drawing Lab - several rather awful gesture sketches of our 16 year old dog as she aimlessly wandered through the house. But, hey, I actually did something.

That evening, it was time for our annual sit-in-the-back-of-the-pickup-waiting-for-fireworks picnic and I sketched as the light faded away.  No instructions required - just me doing my artist thing.

Today's post was intended as a catch up for the past few weeks of arting, but it'll grow quite long.  I excel at wordiness.  You can't imagine how long these posts are before I viciously edit them.

Come back soon for the continued initial persistence, the miraculous and wonderful opportunity (okay, not actually miraculous) that kept me from SBS, and how Playing is playing out.  (Heh heh.  Clever, she is.)