I Think I Have Chosen a Direction

I seem to have made a decision about a direction.

 I have been buying books about drawing, mixed media, and who knows what else for years. And I've got a bunch of art supplies as well. Not as many as I think I need because I've bought still more books, a couple of downloaded tutorial files on two kinds of drawing, and a bunch of art supplies that are different from what I already had in the house.

I want to draw and I also want to do mixed media Art Journaling. I've known that I wanted to do those things for a long time. I was an art major in High School and in College. The problem was that I didn't like the stuff I was doing and didn't have a whole lot of respect for it either. After I left college I never picked up a pen or a pencil, and every time I tried to I discovered that I just felt awful and clumsy.

Instead I used both needlework and computer arts as creative outlets. I did digital scrapbooking for years until Joe got so sick I could not stand the idea. And I did very nice work. But it just wasn't enough. I kept buying books.

 Here are just a few of them.

I also took some photos of some of my art supplies.

I never had a full set of pencils when I was an art student. So those were fun to buy. And the Prismacolor pencils were actually bought for a quilting art project that I couldn't get to because of the Fibromyalgia. I did practice coloring on one of my sample  free motion quilting pieces, and they are an amazing tool.

 I did draw a few flowers from the How to draw a tulip. And it felt OK, so we will see where that goes as I go through the tutorials. The one already in the house is for what I call Art Journaling faces. I followed along with my first time watching the first half of that and sure enough I got a reasonable face.

The second downloadable tutorial is on regular pencil drawing. I need to find out how to get that after I finish here.

But I think my next hands on project will be to make some background pages using some of the paint I've got in the house and a couple of the surfaces I've already bought. I'd do that today, but I've got some gesso coming from Amazon and one of the YouTube tutorials I've already seen tells me that I need to put that on the paper first to make the grounds work better.

There are a couple of other things going on in my life that I have not blogged about. I bought a Roku box when I upgraded some of the television equipment earlier this month. I am slowly learning how to use it and adding channels. YouTube is one of the ones I want to add.

And I'm looking for a new church. My neighbor goes to one that is local and I went with her last Sunday and will do so again this Sunday. I was shocked when I received two "hello" notes on Thursday. Very pleasantly surprised. It is the one thing that my old church never managed. When I first went there I asked for someone to contact me for weeks, but no one ever did. And when I got sick they didn't figure out that I was missing for a very long time. I've discovered that I need a congregation that manages that kind of thing better.

Take care all.