Making Progress

Each day, we both make a little progress towards getting things back to normal. He has been a trooper about doing what he needs to do and he is getting more stamina each day. I am still surprised by how completely I underestimated how much time it would take to help him with the things he needs help with and keep the household running these past two weeks. I thought that last week I would have 30 - 45 minutes here and there to get a little work done. Nope for last week and barely for this week. While he is much more self-sufficient, this week there are a number of either PT/medical appointments. I am grateful to be self-employed, since I cleared my schedule this week of anything which didn’t absolutely have to be done for work.

I am getting back to painting. Not surprisingly, my focus and attention is less than stellar. For now, it’s enough to be painting, regardless of what’s coming off the paint brush. The first thing I painted with my current fuzzy brain was a lemon and the painting itself was also a lemon. Next up, I did a timed painting of a cat pitcher in my kitchen. My intention was to draw it from life, but I was fighting with the viewfinder and myself. I took the easy route and took a picture of the set up and drew from that.

I used an orange background that I painted awhile back. It probably would have been better to wait until I was in a better painting groove, but I decided that I wanted to experiment. Since this was an 8 x 10, I gave myself 25 minutes, initially. That wasn’t enough time, so I continued to work at a similar pace and stopped at 37 minutes. Most places really could use another layer of paint, especially since you can see some of the grid lines. Ugh!

#315 - Cat Pitcher - 8" x 10" paper

It’s one of those things where I can’t say that I like it, but I can say that three, two, or even one year ago I would not have been able to do this. I will repaint this in the future, since I’ve wanted to give it a try.

Next up was a 12 minute landscape. We had people coming over, so I wanted to paint, but was also rushed. It needs more contrast, better paint strokes, and so on.

#316 - Timed Landscape - 6" x 6" - paper

Since I wanted to keep up with the online class, I jumped back in with timed paintings, but it's not working for me. Since there's no reason to push myself (at least in this part of my life), I am going to either jump ahead to the next set of materials or just do a few paintings without the time pressure.