If you live in California or other moderate climates, you can wait until January to plant daffodils. The added bonus is that the bulbs will be on sale. This daff with the narcissus might be from last year. I may even have waited until February to plant all those daffs this year.( If they don’t bloom, I hope I remember to not wait so long next year.)
I found a recipe for streak free glass cleaner on a favorite blog, Everyday Cheapskate. Couldn’t wait to try it on my studio windows; it rained the next day so I didn’t get to fully appreciate the streak freeness—you know, how windows always look their worst when the sun shines directly on them.
Trail Guy feeds the birds daily. These birds are abundant, but I forget their names. I prefer wildflowers to wildbirds. (I know “wildbird” isn’t a single word, but it looks better with “wildflower”.)
Thus we conclude another peek into life in my favorite month of February in Three Rivers.
For the first time in many years, I kept track of how long this took. Getting these little people to be themselves took a very very long time. (Don’t ask—not telling). It is probably (past) time to raise my prices.
This may be the most difficult pencil drawing commission I’ve ever accepted. I’m getting it done anyway.
I showed you this yesterday. To prevent (or at least to mitigate) smearing, I work from top to bottom, left to right. Left-handers can go from right to left. (All of us need to remember to lay a piece of paper over the drawing rather than rest our hands on it while working on it.)
Each time I work on it, I revisit the faces to see if it is possible to get a closer likeness. This isn’t required by the customers, who understand that would be asking the impossible, particularly in the second section.
Not sure how to tie the various parts of the drawing together, so I left gaps for awhile. Then I started fiddling around trying to mesh one segment with the next.
I added some sky so the snow on the mountains shows up better.
Two ideas that have come as I labor through this: (1) The dudes on Tunnel Rock are slightly larger and moved over (from the photo) so they fit better with the segment above. (2) There was a gap beneath the sequoia tree, which I could have filled with a yucca as the photo showed; a better idea was to put Charlie’s bass drum with the name of the band. (Jazzberry Jam is the old name.)
Maybe I had a stroke. A memory lapse. A fugue state. Whatever happened, I am now in the midst of the most difficult commission I have ever accepted. It breaks the Biggest Rule*, which is No Portraits, and always always always, No Face Smaller Than an Egg (in case I break the Biggest Rule).
That used to mean a chicken egg, but now, IF I were to accept a portrait commission, it would need to be an ostrich egg.
So what happened?? I accepted a commission with 14 faces the size of a hummingbird egg, and 6 faces the size of 1/4 of a hummingbird egg.
The weirdest part is that I am enjoying the challenge. This could be because I warned the customers that capturing likenesses was highly unlikely.
And yet, I am trying like crazy to capture likenesses.
Too bad you can’t see the numbers on the ruler. It shows that the drawing is only 11” wide.
Yeppers, dropped on my head.
*The Biggest Rule in my personal (unpublished) rule book of how to have an art business
If you have followed my blog for a few years (THANK YOU!), you may recall that I love February. When we have decent winters, things turn green and the wildflowers begin. It isn’t hot yet, there is snow on the mountains, the air is clear and the rivers are flowing. With no apologies to those of you who are in the depths of winter (because we all have our tough seasons wherever we choose to live), here are some glimpses into February in Three Rivers, which is the beginning of spring for us.
a very sorry broccoli harvestRed maidsDon’t eat thisFiddlenecksThe second red chair is in the shadeEverlasting pea, something new a neighbor has plantedSpeedwell?That amazing flowering pearBuckeyes are the first to leaf out Patriotic seatingNorth Fork of the KaweahThe primary colors in my yard
An easy-ish walk with a little climb and good views.
Don’t you wish you could live in Three Rivers in late winter/early spring? Fret not, we’ll pay for it in July, August, and September.
Photo taken in Clovis by Jane Sorenson. (Used without permission)
One morning when I shuffled carefully down the driveway by flashlight in the dark toward my neighbor waiting with her flashlight, I asked her, “Tell me again: why do we do this?”
She said, “They say it’s supposed to be good for us.”
I asked, “Are ‘they’ the same people who told us margarine was better than butter? Or coffee was good, then bad, then good? Or wine was bad, then good, and now bad again?”
We chose to go the shorter steepest route, because we find it easier when we can’t see how steep it is.
We turn around at the gate which leads to this place because we are cold, it is dark, and my neighbor has to get to work.
As the light increases each day in February, we start dreading the time change. When we were kids, it changed to Daylight Saving in April, and then it changed back to Standard Time in October. Some time in early adulthood years, the changes got moved to March and November, so that Daylight Saving is a now longer stretch than Standard. So “Standard” is more accurately “Nonstandard”, or “Irregular”.
Like with most big issues, we Americans are evenly divided on which time schedule is best. In general, urbanites prefer more light in the evening, and rural folks prefer (and often NEED) more light in the morning. Almost everyone agrees that jerking our internal clocks around is annoying at best, and dangerous at worst. (The dummies think they are somehow tricking Father Time into providing more hours of daylight.)
I expect that in spite of widespread discontent and the adverse consequences of a twice-yearly time change, the People in Charge will do nothing. Politicians are so concerned with retaining votes that they are paralyzed when decisions are a 50/50 proposal, with the unintended consequence of everyone being unhappy. In addition to the elected officials, it is often the bureaucrats who end up interfering in our lives.
I expect to be walking in the dark for the rest of my life.
“You’ll never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” —Thomas Sowell
Have you heard of her? Read any of her books? She writes both fiction and non-fiction and is an odd combination of being very politically liberal and outspoken about her Christian faith. Her thoughts are oh so relatable, shocking, irreverent, vulnerable, infuriating, and at times, highly entertaining.
The books she might be most known for are Bird by Bird, about the writing process and Operating Instructions, about raising her son alone.
Here are three things that I have copied down from her writing to contemplate and muse over on today’s blog post.
“Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared.” The older I get, the more I see this is true. Those tailgaters? Yep. Politicians? Yep. Your neighbors with the glaring lights and barking dogs? Yep. The cranky salesperson at a big box store? Yep. Me? Hey, let’s not get personal here, okay?
“Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.” Comparison is a terrible way to live. Just stop it.
“…deteriorating faster than you can lower your standards.” This may apply to many aspects of my life. Let’s not talk about the state of my old car, the cleanliness of my house, the number of weeds in my yard, the unsorted piles in my studio.
*Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination. -Christina Scalise
She also has a list called “Twelve Truths I Learned From Life and Writing”, which is one of my favorite Ted talks of all. I used to listen to those while painting and drawing, but now I seem to be continually trying to catch up on all the excellent podcasts I subscribe to.
About those Twelve Truths: she is oh so very wrong about chocolate with 75% cacao.
… I am working on several art projects at once. That is, IF I am actually working.
The little beach paintings are still progressing. I have enough boards for twelve of these. Six are now completed, three more are in the messy first layer stages, and three more are waiting for my decision to either paint more beach scenes, or paint some oranges.
I like these little boards.
Pacific Ocean IV, 5×7”, oil on gessobord*, $75
There are also three unfinished oil paintings in the painting workshop, but none have deadlines. The beach paintings don’t have deadlines either, but their small size gives me the illusion of productivity and progress.
Meanwhile, I have two very complicated pencil commissions to complete. One is now in progress; the other is awaiting my thumbnail sketches for the customer to choose from.
“Bad things happen quickly; good things take a long time. This is why patience and determination are such primary virtues.”
I don’t know who said this, but I intend for these two difficult pencil commissions to be good, so they may take a long time.
*Gessobord is something akin to masonite, coated very smoothly with gesso, a thick white paint, probably acrylic.
What is editing? You mean you get paid to just sit around and read??
… I’m either tending to the logistics and administrative duties of a microscopic art business* or I am editing. IF I am actually working, that is.
Yes but it isn’t the same as reading for escape or to learn. Instead, you read with multiple purposes. An editor’s job is to make sure the reader can flow through the book without tripping over the words.
The reading is something like this:
Why do I keep going back to that paragraph? It might have too many words, but for some reason I am not sure of the author’s intent. Maybe it would be clearer like [try a different way of phrasing].
Wait, wasn’t that guy’s name Jim in the last chapter? Then who is Jack? Better do a Jim/Jack check throughout.
Oh-oh, the author is using the tab key instead of indention for new paragraphs; better make sure all those tabs/extra spaces/extra returns get removed throughout.
Eighteen? I thought she was twenty. Where did it mention her age? Better make a note to find all those references and verify the timeline.
Why does this character start every sentence with “So”? This might need a bit of modification. Not too much, because that is how he talks, but if he gets too boring, we might lose our reader’s attention.
Oops, those paragraphs are ragged right rather than justified; better “select all” and choose “justified” so the entire manuscript is consistent. While I’m at it, better make sure hyphenation is turned off or some words will go wonky.
Hmmm, sometimes that word is spelled with a hyphen and sometimes as a compound word. Seek and replace the wrong version.
What am I supposed to do with this list of bullets beneath the heading? Or the bullets beneath the bullets? Wait, is that a subheading that needs to be indented? Does this need to be a new section, or do those words need to be non-bold? If I am confused as to the main topic, the reader might just skip this section.
Semi colon alert! Better watch more carefully.
What is the point of this paragraph? Can it be deleted?
Meanwhile, I am keeping up with the storyline, making sure that it is moving along at a good clip. A problem with editing is that I get caught up in the story and forget to think all those multi-layered thoughts as I am reading.
Sometimes the day goes quickly, so quickly that when I head home, I am surprised that it is dusk. I would be surprised that the cats were put away for the night if Trail Guy didn’t stick his head in the studio to let me know.
“. . . Of making many books, there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” —Ecclesiastes 12:12b
