a messy desk

Last week I went to open one of my desk drawers and it was stuck. I had to remove the drawer above it to fix the situation. Needless to say, things couldn't stay that messy. So I went to my favorite dollar store and picked up a much of little bins and trays and spent an evening straightening things out. I also got rid of a lot of supply/tool clutter that was frankly junk, and now everything is working much smoother. Simple fix, and now I don't have to dig around for that one pen I want to use.

weekly art project: muni people

I really wanted to do some sort of small scale, regular art project this year. I have been keeping a growing note in my phone with descriptions of people I see on the train and bus on my daily commute, and so inspired by that, I decided to do a weekly project, where I take one of those descriptions and illustrate it each week. I'm using 3 by 5 index cards, ink and one color in watercolor for each character and I have been posting them to Instagram some time each Sunday. Now that I have been keeping this up for a whole month I feel like I can share them here.

I'm not sure what I will do with this series at the end of the year (fingers crossed I keep it up for the whole 52 weeks) but I have eleven more months to come up with ideas. In the meantime, I'm enjoying having one more excuse to aggressively people watch each day, and I look forward to whatever characters I manage to observe in the wild next.

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painting large

I really miss school, particularly, getting assignments. Therefore when someone comes to me and wants something special, it's like being right back in the classroom and I love every bit of it. I recently had the opportunity to paint a large piece for someone, they wanted big (it was five feet wide!) and 'maybe nature-y' so I picked up some paint ( and some larger brushes!) and paced a bit in front of the blank canvas's and finally just started painting. And this is what I ended up with.

I actually made a little gif of the whole process because I made a point of taking pictures of each step because it was interesting how much things changed or didn't change so I will see if I can get that up here as well. Overall it was a wonderful experience. I've been working with tiny pens and tiny brushes exclusively for a while and it was wonderful to just get really messy and throw some paint around and make big expressive shapes. I even got to wear my coveralls (because I am not even remotely tidy when I paint) which is always a fun time. I was particularly into the edges (it's always fun to have an image wrap around). Anyway, before the painting took off to it's new home I removed it from the plastic drop cloth covered work space and took a few pictures. Very satisfying, if a little sad to see it go. Now I just need to come up with more reasons to paint this big!

january cocktail

Well I know I had mentioned a special cocktail to go with the 'party' and favors from last week, however due to a minor snafu on my party, that didn't go up last week as it should how. So without further delay, here's what I came up with.

2-3 sprigs rosemary

3 oz grapefruit juice

1.5 oz vodka

.75 oz orange liquor 

2 dashes bitters

serve in coupe with sugared rim and garnish with rosemary and grapefruit peel

(the grapefruit and rosemary be muddled together for stronger flavor or the rosemary could be left out entirely and you'd be left with a simpler but still tasty grapefruit drink.)

brushes

I got a cordless drill for Christmas. 

It was pretty much the best present ever and I've already used it several times, with a bunch more projects lined up. Other than basic things like hanging shelves (so much easier with a drill vs a screwdriver) this was the first thing I thought of making when I opened it up. I've seen things like these before (I might even have one on a Pinterest board somewhere) though I believe they were being used as a holder for pencils not brushes, but I liked the idea of having some way to have my brushes organized and out on my desk, as opposed to jumbled together in a jar or drawer. This was as easy as drilling a few different size holes into a block of wood and filling it with brushes. I've been using it for a few weeks and it's perfect, I even have space to add to my brush collection!

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