Currently: March 2018

Yay for Spring!

The daffodils are poking their leaves up through the ground – mine always come up a couple of weeks later than the neighbors. I’m particularly happy to see them this March because we had two bad floods last summer and I was worried they would have rotted away in the swampy soil in the back of the yard.

Currently I’m:

Lettering all the things. I started with the Show Me Your Drills challenge in December, but it was actually mostly over and I was doing it by myself. It started up again so I started over, and it is much more fun to do with with encouraging emails and internet friends. I’m also plugging away at the 90# Drills Challenge – I’m on day 56 which is the lower case “n”.

My entire thought about this hobby was it would be inexpensive because I’d just need to buy pens (paper is free from the recycling bin at work). And that came to a screeching halt last weekend when I upgraded my aging iPad to an iPad Pro and bought the iPencil, and a super cool app called Procreate. The settings in the app let you set up the iPencil to mimic the different types of brush lettering pens, and it’s a little different writing on glass, but it’s really amazing. And fun and frustrating just like lettering lessons on paper.

Watercoloring. I’ve been working through online classes and videos and pinning inspirational images to work toward. I’ve split into working on two forms – impressionist painting, which is more about the shapes and colors and feelings than the actual details, and illustration, which combines inking and watercoloring together. I’m not going for award winning work in either category – in fact, any time I see a watercolor tutorial post or video with the words “flawless” or “perfect” in the title I just breeze on by. This is just for the sheer fun of it.

Here’s my favorite impressionist painting I’ve created so far – it is Mr. SuzerSpace and me walking somewhere. You know it’s us because I wear an orange jacket (the website said it’s “grapefruit” but I’d say “canteloupe” is a better description), and as a Wisconsin Alum, Mr. SuzerSpace is almost always wearing something red.

For illustrations, I’ve really had a good time painting cacti, but since I posted one of those last month, I’m sharing some backyard birds here below.

I’ve been making all my paintings on small rectangles of watercolor paper – I get eight out of a sheet. At some point I’m going to have to figure out how to make some sort of gallery wall for them.

Crafting. Still working on my granny square blanket, and for St. Patrick’s day I worked up two oversize leprechaun hats (one is at the top of this post). I made them out of paper that was digitally printed to look like glitter. It took me all afternoon to make them, and the math required to figure out how to get them to fit on our heads (diameter and circumference, remember those?) would have made my dad smile.