Roz Stendahl class and Susie Monday class: Keeping busy

This morning Roz Stendahl's class began and I am quite excited about it.  She is asking the participants to commit to drawing at least 30 minutes a day in order to develop a new habit, working on the theory that it takes 30 days to establish any new habit.  And she is giving up suggestions for keeping the inner critic's voice down to a dull roar!!  This class is going to be a bit hard going for me at times, since I am not at all mobile these days and the class does involve sketching in public, but I will do my best.  I believe it is a truly worthy habit to cultivate.

This is part of an exercise that I did this morning.  Roz had posted a video of some chickens that she was drawing at the Minnesota State Fair and suggested that one could complete today's drawing exercise from the video by simply rewinding the 'chicken' part of the video until one had been drawing for 30  minutes.  I did about 7 pages of drawings which was totally fun.  And concentrating so hard on capturing the gestures of the chickens kept my inner critic at bay for a spell.  It's going to be a great class I think.

I am also working away on the class with Susie Monday called Art on the iPad.  Learning about lots of different apps.  I'll try and upload a couple of pictures from that class as well, but it will mean a bit of juggling between my PC and my iPad to retrieve images.  And hi-tech does not exist around here, most certainly not in my head, so we'll see.

So, I was able to bring this picture in from my iPad because I had sent it to a friend the other day and I copied it from my email to her.  But the other three I tried to download don't seem to have come through.  This  is a watercolour of a picture I took the other day....I did not do the watercolour myself, it was done in an app called 'Waterlogue'.  It's a fun app, but one doesn't really have to do anything, just import a picture and the app does the colouring all by itself.  I like the result, but all I did was push a button....still, it does give one ideas for doing an actual painting, so I will continue to play with it.  I suppose that if nothing else, the composition is mine!  Early days.

Another appointment at the surgeon's office yesterday where I got the news that my surgery will be in 12 to 18 months.  Trying to be positive about how I will use my time between now and then but I confess it seems a bit daunting.  And judging from how I have deteriorated just in this past month, there is every likelihood that things will get worse before getting better. More drawing and painting I am thinking.  More Netflix.  I can do this, dammit!

So that's it for today.  I do like being busy, I must say.  I'll be back...

www.rozwoundup.typepad.com; www.susiemonday.com