It is now light enough at 6:30 in the morning for me to walk to the gym. Here I am at the end of my street ready to step into the meadow and cross to the gym with the light in the window on the edge of the picture. It was a beautiful morning.
I went off to buy different ferns for the mostly shady front of the house. Now they are in pots by the garage door and under my windows of the studio.
Still waiting for my yard man to schedule the stone pavers between driveway and grass and mulched areas and grass. I would love to find a stone Japanese garden rabbit. Mostly they are the smaller cartoonish ones. Not what I was hoping for but will keep looking.
My walks have been mostly around the neighborhood and visiting with neighbors. It is so interesting to live among people. The other day I accepted an invitation to join some of them for wine. It was fun to listen to women chatting away and stroke the hostess’s cats while sipping a nice red. They found me entertaining and will ask me back again.
In the studio I have been working out how to color the delicate paper of the dragon scale book about the river. Watercolor bleeds too much and would be seen through the translucency of the page behind so I think colored pencil is my only option. It stays “soft” looking. I have also cut and pieced a paper the exact size of the spaces where the river scene will go with its opening page and all the half inch strips added on to the right. On that I will do the base drawing and then cut off to fit between the pocketed pages to copy the drawing onto the pages to be colored.
It takes several different layers of different colors to get the dimensional look needed for the river scene. So i have pulled all the colors I will need from the various boxes of pencils and placed them into a large cup to select from when I actually start the coloring of the drawing on the scales.
And a bit of catching up on the Sticks and Stones Book.
There is not much else new. I will spend the weekend on the usual. Laundry. Vacuuming. Cleaning counters.
Speaking of cleaning, I purchased an old fashioned (but brand new) Fuller brush sweeper to pick up the endless supply of cat hair gathering on floors and carpets. It is smaller than the ones from the fifties but works amazingly! I no longer have to “moon walk” on the carpets collecting cat hair as I walk backwards to a corner where I can pull it off my rubber soles to toss in the bin. This little sweeper picks it up as well as the tracked cat litter that ends up far from the litter box. And it grabbed up my crumbs from baking brown sugar oatmeal cookies yesterday. The vacuum cleaner is getting a well-needed rest since the Fuller arrived.
So off for a walk, maybe to the river and back home for some libation before a dinner of vegetable juice and a savoury scone.
Til later…