Pixels and Paperie

Painting; a leaking pipe & the need (not desire) to sort out my Driver's License.....

I have to blog more! I was so good in the beginning, but lately, since the PC went on the blink, I seem to be trying to catch up with so much scrapping that I have neglected my little blog life here.

Today I continued my painting of Edgar Degas' Blue Dancers. I loved this painting last week, this week - well lets just say I am going through a bit of a "love-hate" relationship with it. I am tired of all the blue and flesh colours and really need to get it finished so I can at least move on to a fresh new colour palette - and a different subject matter. Ultimately I think I'll end up loving the painting, but once you have blended 2 blues with black, white and 2 browns- you can expect to tire of these colours!

Here's a peek at the original :

I absolutely love Degas' paintings. I have done one of his 'bathers' before and so enjoyed it.

This one we tried using a more monochromatic colour scheme, but ended up adding more colours than one would traditionally use for monochrome paintings. At the moment it still has much less colours than this one (the original), but I think I will still add the burnt orange touches afterward as I love the warmth it brings to the painting. I will post a pic of mine here once complete.

I saw a lot of Degas' paintings in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris 2 years ago. They are actually quite a bit smaller than I imagined them to be. Also, most either were done entirely in pastel, or a combination of other mediums like gouache, or oil with pastels.

As a result, the paintings are now kept behind glass in an extremely dark room to preserve them by protectiong them from bright light. So my plans to take photos of them went flying out the (non-existent) windows in the museum! No flashes are (understandably) allowed and the room really was extremely dark.

Off the subject of art, but not entirely off painting- this time painting the house! Which is what we're going to have to do very soon as we now have discovered what we think is a leaking pipe on the jacuzzi balcony off our bathroom. The resultant wet walls in the laundry and kitchen are what alerted us to this fact! So tomorrow Leon will call the insurance company - coz hey, we simply cannot keep forking more money out on maintenance for the house! It's now time to call in the cavalry, so to speak.

Tomorrow I also have the unfortunate hassle of having to sort out my driver's license. Yes- not renew- but rather sort out! As it was renewed a year ago and I still don't have a copy of my new license! (Okay, I do leave things until I really just can't anymore!! ) I have been wanting to go eversince we realised that my license was not arriving in the post. Leon & I went together in February last year - stood in the HEAT in a VERY LONG queue!!! FOR FOUR (4!!!) hours!!! Only to have his sent to him, and mine has never arrived!!!

I have prepared myself that I may just have to go through the whole episode again - eyetests and all as I'm sure my application simply landed on someone's desk who threw it into 'file 13' (aka the dustbin!) Okay, I am not going to be pessimistic- let's hope it is filed under H for Hurly instead and I simply can collect it with only a few minutes of time wasted tomorrow! (Yeah, sure - and it might snow tomorrow here too!) Added to all of this, our local driver's license offices are useless and always way too busy, so I'll be driving about 40min out of town to Rayton to collect mine.

So that's my morning. The afternoon will be a case of fetching and carrying kids at different times from school again - I pick Shannon up at 13h30 (no compulsory school sport tomorrow due to a gala), then take her home. Reece must be collected an hour later at 14h30. Then I must take him home. Give them both lunch and get homework going. Shannon needs to be back at school again at 16h00 for a tennis lesson. I'll have to drop her off, and my mom will have to collect her again at 16h30 as Reece has to be at swimming 15 min drive away from the school by 16h30 for his lesson. Have I ever mentioned that I dislike the car intensely?

[Hopefully by the afternoon of loads of driving, I'll at least have some sort of driver's license!]

In between all this, I'm hoping to get Week 8 finished of my Life 365 photo a day challenge. I even missed out on the incentive this week as I simply ran out of time to finish Week 8 in time. I am determined to complete weeks 9 and 10 in time for the next incentive - even though I should already be busy with Week 9 already.

Here's my Week 7 : 12-18 February. (I work Thursday to Wednesday each week as the 1st of January was a Thursday this year).

Gosh, I just noticed that I put 12-19 on here instead of 12-18 February! Luckily I can fix that as I saved the .psd file as well as the .jpeg! (Note to self- don't forget to do this!)

Well that's me all up to date now- except foe the fact that I've skipped a couple of weeks in between LOL! Oh well- one can't do everything!