so I was away for a while...

February and March plodded along until they just flew by... Yes, long time no blog. It was winter. It was Michigan. What can I say? I spent a lot of time in doors working on the in doors. My office / studio / living room underwent a slight cosmetic makeover. It is the room that I spend the bulk of my time in, so it was time for it to feel like a room that I wanted to spend most of my time in.

Before

After

It's the little things that make the biggest difference. I bought bookcases and assembled them so that I could move a lot of magazines and piles of paper and boxes of craft supplies out of the room. That alone made it feel like less of a glorified storage closet...
Then I started working on my desk. I have 2 of them. One of them had just become a place to set a printer and pile things... that was kind of silly. So, I moved a lot of stuff off my desk and better organized the things that needed to stay. And now I can actually sit there and draw - which was the desired result.

Plus, I framed and then hung many of my original drawings...

And then I got the chair...

It's one of those padded accent chairs. It's perfect. It's nice and low - the way I like my desk-to-chair ratio so that what I'm working on is close to eye level.

So, it's nice to have somewhere to sit and work without trying to balance a drawing board on my lap as my foot falls asleep.
Hopefully winter treated you well, and spring will eventually begin and stick around for a little while before we veer directly into 90˚F days of summer...

hibernation

I was never a child who liked to take naps. When I was too young for school and was at home with my Mother, she used to try to sneak in a daily nap. Translation, as a 3 year old I was like "Sleep during the day? What, you mean peak playing hours? What about my dolls?" So, basically, as I recall these events I would lay down and wait for the sound of my mother's door closing, and then I would get up and play 'quietly.' This sleeping in the middle of the day thing never made sense to me... it still doesn't.

And yet, it's January. January isn't so much a time for napping as it is a time for 'hibernating.' I don't mean I go into my bedroom and sleep for a month, I just mean January is the month when I'm just tired.

It snows here in Michigan. And what that actually means is that it takes me an additional 20 to 30 minutes to drive to and from work, plus 5 minutes of scraping my car, plus me driving in my car with frozen fingers waiting for the 2 mile point when the heat might finally come up. In other words, a 35 minute drive just turned into an hour... cold weather = giant time suck.

I hate being cold. It just makes me cranky and tired (not unlike napping — which never made me feel refreshed, it just made me cranky; my brain chemicals don't like to be tricked with the prospect of sleep (8 hours) only to be pranked into wakefulness after an hour). Napping never worked for me, and I just find cold weather to be unbelievably irritable.

Anyway, one morning last week while I was watching CSI reruns on Spike tv, I did manage to crank out 15 new paintings. Which, of course, meant that I spent a day waiting for them to dry, spent a good hour 'naming' them, and then spent a morning & a half scanning them into the computer and saving them in 3 file formats after color correcting the scans. And then I varnished the paintings (another morning). And then I gessoed the backs to counteract warping (another morning). And then I printed out info sheets (artist, title, media, date) for the back. And then I remembered to stop at Walmart on my way home from work because I couldn't find a freaking glue stick, and then last night I glued the backs on all the paintings...

Considering how relatively quickly I can paint them, the process-y stuff after the painting part is enormously time consuming. Anyway, painting — or moreover: playing with color — makes me happy. So, I suppose that's my counter-January measure: colorful paintings.

I like color — as can be evidenced from the photo I took for the entry. My bedroom is actually lemon yellow, and those are, in fact, my sheets (300 thread count, from Target). I actually have 2 of my larger paintings hanging on the wall, one it very magenta-y and the other is peachy toned. Most of the 15 paintings I made last week were orange (except for the 2 blue ones). Apparently I was in an 'orange' mood, whatever that means.
Anyway, "astral orange sunshine" is one of the new ones, you can see it here.

Ironically, I seem to have contracted a cold: sore throat, cough, runny nose, weepy left eye... So, this morning I'll be going to the drugstore to acquire some more kleenex and stand in the pharmacy aisle for 20 minutes reading cough syrup boxes... and then buying some orange juice.

So, go have a big tall glass of vitamin C for me & take a nice long nap, maybe 8 hours?
; )