Back To Reality

Today was my last day of vacation, and it's back to the old grinding stone tomorrow. I'm pretty content, though, as I did manage to check off most of the items on my 'Want To Do' List. I've scrubbed and decluttered my flat, and got rid of a lot of useless stuff that I've collected over time. I suspect I was a squirrel in a past life, but this ex-squirrel will just have to learn new tricks now.

I've also tried shibori, gelatin printing, deconstructed printing and and a little bit of this and that. I will blog about some of these things within soon. Just stay tuned.

One of the things that makes me most happy is that I managed to stick to my plan to draw an object every day - without cheating even once! I spent about 45 minutes to 1.5 hours on these drawings and paintings, so I won't be able to continue in the same whay now that I'm back to work. There simply isn't time for it. However, I'm thinking I should devote one evening a week to drawing like this, to practise my eye and hand coordination. And another thing that I need to pracise is to regularly draw simple quick sketches that don't necessarily need to be very realistic or serious. For that I'm going to seek help from Carla Sonheim. I bought her book Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists, which I hope will help me relax and let myself be silly when I'm drawing. In general I'm pretty good at being silly, so I don't know why it's so hard when it comes to drawing

Here are some of my 28 drawings. You can find them all here. 

I did my drawings on 7 A4 sheets that I folded in half. The reason for using loose sheets was that I knew I wanted to use paper of different quality, and also that sketchbooks intimidate me. I'm going to bind these sheets into a little book later. I found this a liberating way of working. Single sheets were also easy to carry with me on my travels.