As you can see from the poll, it seems the majority of my voting constituency thinks I should sign up for the iron man blogging competition. I wish I knew who my 4dissenters were…for instance, if I knew you were family, your votes would count for more. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that in the spirit of democracy I’ll go ahead and sign up, but I’m only committing to a trial period of say, two weeks. After that, if daily postings are driving us all nuts and ruining the essence of our communication, we’ll withdraw.
Yesterday after church a bunch of us in the “young” crowd (which spans roughly 19 years old to 37ish) went out to a diner-style burger place called Cindy’s. The burgers aren’t bad, but they sure aren’t American either. When the weather is nice like it was yesterday, all the restaurants on that street put tables and chairs outside. We sat in the sun for a few hours visiting and I didn’t get home from church until 5 pm! But it was fun.
Last night I put my new pastels to good use. I drew the following landscape based on a demonstration in Elizabeth Mowry’s book The Pastelist’s Year.
Normally I do my own compositions, of course, but I have new pastels that are considerably softer than what I’m used to and I’m trying to learn to use Wallis paper too. So, I took the easy route and copied for the sake of learning. I’m fairly happy with the results, but I can see I’ll have to be really careful to not get carried away with my initial color application on this surface--There are several areas that got a little thick and muddy. I might correct them later this week. People always say sanded paper is so flexible and you can build up lots of layers, but I still think the suede mat board can handle more. The major advantage of Wallis paper in my opinion is that it facilitates working quickly. This picture only took me about 4 hours, even with the learning curve. The same drawing on mat board would have taken me 7.
