3 minute line drawing

Sketch a day #13 3 min

Detailed drawings that take hours to complete are a great way to relax and to practice all the techniques required in portraying a subject.

However, a quick 3 minute line drawing is a great way to capture the essence of an image.

This quick line drawing is my lunch.  You can see why I didn't want to spend hours drawing it... it wanted to eat it.

The drawing is of a glass of milk in a clear square-ish glass,  and a square glass saucer that holds my lunch... a Kind bar with peanut butter on top. I am trying to be good.

We might be too young to downsize

sketch a day 12 30min

This is for yesterday.  I missed a day.

Hubby and I spent the day looking at houses.  We would like to downsize. Our house is huge... frankly too big to really keep clean with only 2-3 people living in it 80% of the time. So we went looking at new home developments in the area, hoping there was something out there for middle aged folks who wanted something smaller, but nice.

No-siree...there wasn't.  Based on what we found, I have come to realize that in our suburban area if we want to downsize will will either have to buy something in a less desirable area of town or wait 9 years.  Apparently we are too young to downsize.

The the two-3 bedroom houses with nice finishes are reserved for 55 and older communities!  Sure there are starter houses here and there but they are finished with poorly done laminate countertops and linoleum floors. This is not the kind of thing that 40-something year olds is looking to move into.  Our best bet would be to go to an area closer to the city that is gentrifying, and buy something old and redo it.  That is not my idea of a good time either. Unless, I could find something that wasn't really built to be a house that I could transform into one.

The sketch above is of a neighborhood association club house that I have redrawn as a home.  (I turned the sitting and storage areas into bedrooms. When I go smaller, I don't want to move into a bunch of tiny cramped rooms.  Instead, I want fewer large rooms.  Still that would include less square feet, but unless I am living in NYC... (long story) I don't want to live in a closet.

It seems to me that because houses are built so large in the Atlanta area, it is hard for homebuilders to fathom that homeowners might want something more reasonably sized.  But even those huge houses are built poorly. In one house we looked in, the bedrooms were too small, and the closets would literally hold 10 outfits max!  And that would be if the closets were packed full!  Who does that?

One that I did like costs $70,000 more than what I already have and had a third floor.  That would just be taking my basement space which I don't use and stacking it on top of the house... Still it was nice, but that would not be downsizing, it would be the opposite.

I don't know what we are going to do... .about a lot of things. A job assignment that would take us to New York has been put on hold.  This started the whole conversation about getting a smaller house here, and getting a little tiny nest in NY.  Regardless of what happens, we know that we want to downsize, but in order to do that, we will have to get a lot closer to the city to find something acceptible and then we will have to gut it to get what we need.

A pain in the head

Sketch a day #11 - 15 minutes. 

No matter how many times it has happened to you, you still don't see it coming.  It starts with something small that creates tension in your body, and then you feel little explosions in your brain and sometimes pretty colors and still you ignore it.

Day two, you realize what is going on, but now the medicine won't work.  You should have taken it yesterday.

Day three, people are trying to drag you off to the emergency room, but you know that they will tell you the same thing as last time, and you promise that it if is still going on tomorrow, you will go.

Fortunately, there's a guy at the mall that knows what to do.  You drag yourself there with one eye open.  You grunt and point, and mumble, "20 minutes" and while what he is doing seems torturous at the moment, and you pray to God that he doesn't actually paralyze you with his gyrations, you leave feeling a bit lighter, and after a nice long nap and a ton of water, you merely feel nauseous.

You've survived another migraine!  Technically, I think mine are tension headaches that turn into cluster headaches... but they are no fun at all.

It makes me sad to know that my son had these his entire childhood.  I am so glad that he rarely ever gets them anymore.  If it weren't for homeschooling though, he would have never been successful because they could derail an entire day of school, but at home, I could put him in bed at the first sign, rub his back, and administer medicine... he could catch up later, or perhaps later in the afternoon depended on when we caught it.

Till next time.

It's Halloween. No candy for you.

Sketch a day #10 - 10min

Today is Halloween, and as usual, I will be following my tradition of busying myself with a movie or a project and ignoring the ringing doorbell.  No, my house doesn't get egged or papered, thank goodness, either my husband or one of my kids has given out candy in the past.  I just don't like to do it.

I am just a non-conformist like that. It bugs me that the same kids who rolled their eyes at me, or harassed my dogs, or left dog poop in my yard when they thought I was not looking will be ringing my bell expecting candy from me.

If it were up to me, I would buy 3 HUGE peices of candy, and a big bag of the most generic stuff I could find, and give most everyone the generic stuff, but then the few kids that are actually well behaved and kind came to my door, I would reward them with a honking big piece of candy in front of everyone else!  That would learn'em.

But hubby's got it.  He got some big bags of candy, and a big friendly smile ready to go.  And tomorrow, he can pick up the dog poop that the same kids left in our yard, or he can deal with them riding their bikes down the center of the street while he tries to wait patiently for them to move over so he can get wherever he is going.

Yes, I am a Halloween scrooge!

And don't even get me started on the SEXY costumes!

Anyway, here's a pumpkin for you!  No, I was too lazy to carve it.