We had a little blog-free interval there, didn't we? Did you enjoy it?

The weather this past weekend was lovely. Absolutely gorgeous, in fact.

The weekend-related excitement was...pretty much nonexistent. I did, in fact, almost nothing. All weekend.

It's hard to be on a diet, be Frugal, and conserve gas, all at the same time. I mean, it's hard to do those things and find a reason to leave the house. It's kind of boring.

Maybe because I don't have a class coming up this week, but I also found myself much less enthralled by the whole drawing thing. (Possibly, after such a non-eventful weekend, I was just burned out from spending too many hours on it.)

This weekend's grand total: 2 cat heads, 1 stoneware bucket, a shoe (patent-leather), and some hair (harder than you might think). I don't know where the cat sketches are coming from. I've probably done more cats than any other single subject. It's just because they're easy, I guess. (The heads, anyhow.)

There were also a few hours spent experimenting with pen-and-ink in the, you know, ink-already-in-the-pen sense, not the dipping sense. It has been generally agreed at my house that the idea of me turned loose upon the world (and our carpet) with a bottle of indelible ink is....not just a recipe for disaster. It's an invitation to disaster. Hence the purchase of tidy, modern pens with the ink safely inside, and in a variety of nib sizes.

I did some rocks with low-to-moderate success. Two trees, then two tree trunks, with a noticeable lack of success. I experimented mostly with the pen-pens. The brush pens should, I suspect, be treated as an entirely new medium.

I thought that now I'm getting the hang of tone and shading with pencil, I should branch out and learn a bit more about line. The next Drawing Class, the one that starts early in November, offers significant emphasis on both line and composition, two areas I'm very weak in, but a little advanced prep never hurts. Especially since it (the class) focuses on pencil and not pen-and-ink.

I found a book that looks like it would teach me what I need to know, but Frugality demands that I allow at least a week to pass before I buy another book. (After figuring that I was averaging one MYSA-AS a day, during the recent buying frenzy, I've tightened the screws on my money card.)

One thing I've figured out about Drawing is that the biggest hurdle comes in Step One, or learning to handle your tools. Once you become comfortable with those, the rest is just a handful of long-existing techniques and a few hours of practice to achieve a certain level of proficiency and to produce recognizable results. I feel certain I will eventually learn to manage these. Especially after I buy the book. Heh. (I think the only thing I've ever found myself unable to learn from a book is writing, where the more I read about how to do it, the less I was able to do it.)

I've been pondering asking the R.C. to get me a small light box for my birthday, but I'm not sure it would suit my needs.

All of the books and my current instructor talk again and again about how the best way to learn is by taking a copy of something done by a 'Master' and tracing it until you get a feel for the lines. Of course, I could lay my art books down, put tracing paper over the images, and trace that way, but I do hate to damage a $70 book that way. OTOH, if it's a $70 book that I never look at, maybe it would be okay? I really can't decide.

It seemed to me that there must be some kind of gadget that you could use to reflect a copy of an image onto a piece of paper, but I haven't been able to find one. The best I've found is a crayola one for kids and it only work with slides (and maybe only the ones that come with it).

It's very annoying to want a new toy and find out that no one has invented it yet, don't you think? This is the second time I've searched for something only to discover that no such things exists. (The other one, the Flashy-Board, would be even more useful on a daily basis. Sigh.)

People all across the globe are worried about global warming and our property management company dug up two perfectly good trees over the weekend.

If I do get a job where I'm Working From Home four days a week, can I justify to myself offsetting the savings in gas and pollution by extra shopping on the weekends?

Probably not, huh?