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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Can you say “Holidays”?

Yay! School holidays started today! I picked the kids up from school today at 11am and already felt a sense of relief.

4 weeks off bliss! No homework in the afternoons, no fetching & carrying to & from school (sometimes 3 or 4 times a day!), no school projects, just some pure fun! = HAPPY MOM!

This weekend is, of course, Easter. We’re at home, a quiet long weekend for us.

Tuesday we’re off to our little place of African heaven… The bushveld.

Hopefully we will see more of these beautiful prehistoric looking creatures…. I just love how this little baby is resting on his mommy’s back!

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& this won’t happen again…(feb 2012)

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the new, wider floodplain after the floods this summer…

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Don’t you just love these faces?

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You get the picture?

We’ll be back again after about a week, then we’ll relax at home until it’s my mom-in-law’s 80th birthday.

The whole family (the birthday girl + 5 kids + each of their spouses, + all 10 grandchildren= 21 in total) will be off for 3 days down to Umhlanga in Kwazulu Natal to a beautiful old hotel which was recently revamped …

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I cannot wait to take photos of the beautiful lighthouse! (and I have to admit staying in such a gorgeous spot will be sublime!)

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So this school holiday, we’ll have a bit of the bush and a bit of the beach – the best of both worlds – I can’t wait!

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Monday, April 2, 2012

Autumn in April

The little sign on the postcard below says “Guess who’s sending this to you”. Well, guess who is actually writing a blog post? Yip – I am!

I have The Graphics Fairy permanently on my internet homepage and this rather funny postcard popped up for April 1st. Isn’t that fish funny? It’s like a carrier fish I guess (as in carrier pigeon?).

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My birthday also happens to be April 1st (I know- funny ha! ha!) My kids even managed to prank me yesterday on my birthday! Shocking! Winking smile

One reason I haven’t blogged in a while is that my internet has been so erratic lately! It simply goes off-line at whim. I discovered the problem has to do with my noisy crackling landline which then naturally interferes with the ADSL signal. {sigh!} It got fixed a week ago, and 2 days after, it went all crackly on me again. So here I am crossing fingers and thumbs that the signal holds out (and that dear old Telkom fixes the problem again soon!).

I must tell you what else has kept me very busy…

I have been doing an online drawing course. (Well- trying to do it in between internet signals!)

The course I started is called “I (heart) drawing” by Jane Davenport.  About a 1/4 of the way in, I discovered I should have done her “Supplies Me” course first – so I stopped the first one and started with “Supplies Me”.

“Supplies Me” is, well, all about getting the most from your art supplies & finding which media you enjoy best. Jane’s classes are fabulous – funny and filled to the brim with valuable information with loads of tips. She takes you through different media like pencils, watercolour, acrylics etc. and then with each week of the 8 week course, you learn to draw faces and figures – Jane’s way. Now let me tell you, Jane’s method of creating figures & faces out your head – be it whimsical or more realistic drawings- is so easy to follow and made such a change to the way I approach my art.

The best part is that even if you are not natural at drawing, perhaps you are simply just ‘creative’ rather than ‘artistic’, Jane will be able to teach you how to draw! The bottom line is practise.

After finishing ‘Supplies Me’, I will go back and complete “I heart drawing”. This is more of a detailed look at drawing figures – especially stylised fashion figures as well as faces.

Jane will also be doing a new course from 30 April which is all about drawing fairies and other mythical creatures. In the course you also create your own fairy tale. I am itching to start that one!!

Here are a couple of the drawings I’ve done in my journals in mixed media:

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in pencil on plain paper:

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and more mixed media…

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If you are interested in Jane’s courses, take a peek at her blog:

http://www.janedavenport.com/