Hello again...

Now that it's once again dark before I leave work and there's snow on the ground here, I have no more excuses for putting off any of my writing work! So here I am; hopefully I won't disappear off the blogging radar again for quite awhile. While my summer was not very adventurous, I have some plans coming up that bring me back to my writing. (For instance--since Henry has decided this is the year for me to stop stalling and learn how to snowboard, and I fall down even when I'm not flying through the snow on a waxed board, I figure I should keep this up to give everyone a little more amusement!)

I've had a few adventures, both good and bad, over the last few months. Rather than going through the scattered details in my head, I figure I'll summarize with some photos.

Cooper, my parents' new golden retriever puppy, showed up!

We went to the Renaissance Fair. Henry got soaked.

Henry and I took a long weekend in Chicago and ate a lot of pizza and hot dogs

I spent a few days helping my family clean up from a flood

Steamboat Willie and I moved...we now have our own front door, grilling area AND washer and dryer!

And now that it's winter again, it's time for the holidays, birthdays, snowboarding and a bunch of new adventures!

Lots of sumi-e

I was too lazy all of last week to post my pictures from my sumi-e class, so I have quite a lot of photos. I have to say that last week, I was not particularly interested in continuing with sumi-e. We drew a lot of baby chicks and grapes, which is a nice idea until you try to do that for two whole hours when you normally can't concentrate for more than 10 minutes. On anything. So, I ended up with a progression like this:

Instead of what I was supposed to paint, which looked more like this:

This week, I enjoyed myself a lot more. For starters, we were painting landscapes, which I find more interesting than chickens. More importantly, landscapes seemed to be more adaptable than chickens. When I got bored with the one she had demonstrated, I started to make some up that used the same strokes.

On top of there being more variety, I feel like I had a little more skill at drawing landscapes, which is a nice motivator! So, class ended with me buying some more xuan paper and some colors to try. Hopefully, in spite of the fact that the ink smells like extra strength bug spray, that means I'll keep going at least sometimes with this!

Sumi-e practice

After a whole lot of practice, I'm making some progress....I'm having fun with the different shades of grey, although I'm not very good at controlling them yet. I like the leaves on this, though:

But my favorite drawing so far was done entirely with the small brush that I was only supposed to use for detail. Maybe I'm better on the small scale?

Matting and Sumi-e

It's been a busy week--yesterday was my last matting and framing class, and today was my first sumi-e brush painting class.

The matting class worked out surprisingly well, considering that I screwed up my first mat for each of my pictures. In the end, though, I ended up with two pretty photos that would have probably cost me hundreds of dollars to have custom matted and framed.

And the really tricky one, painted on a ceiling tile:

My sumi-e class was fun, but unfortunately got a little long for me. It's a fun idea, and I did find it easier than regular painting. Next week I believe that we'll get to start using some color, which should be fun. This week we concentrated on painting peonies, which would have been much easier if I had more than a passing acquaintance with what peonies look like. I remembered them being a big, showy flower and otherwise went off my instructors demonstration paintings.

After a few pages of practice, I managed to make some decent flowers. Next week, I believe the plans is baby chicks--we'll see how that goes!

Pictures from Puerto Vallarta

Home from Mexico and I've downloaded my pictures--ones I take out the blurry ones and the repeats, I come up with around 400 photos. Henry keeps encouraging me to take up photography more seriously, learning more about the manual settings and how things work and finding some better equipment (even though I like my point-and-click cameras!) and sometimes I wonder whether it would be a helpful or horrible hobby. I might be able to take fewer pictures, when I look at the number of times I had to take one particular pictures sometimes to get the effect I wanted. Or, I might just go crazy and end up coming home with thousands of pictures...

At any rate, here are a few of my favorites!

This is the view from the balcony of the resort we stayed at.

This is the actual city of Puerto Vallarta as seen from the boardwalk. We stayed in Nuevo Vallarta, which is about a 20 minute cab ride away, but finally went to Puerto Vallarta on Tuesday and Thursday.

Most of our days we spent up in the Sierra Madre Mountains, which look pretty much like this.

Our snorkeling tour went to the Marietas Islands, which is a bird santuary. No one can set foot on the island, but we went snorkeling in the bay here.

The Botanical Gardens up in the mountains was one of my favorite activities (even though we got lost for awhile on the bus and ended up taking a long detour...) and most of my photos are from here.

There was also a great little swimming hole at the Botanical Gardens--unfortunately I didn't know to bring my swimsuit, but I at least went wading! I think this may also be where most of my annoying bug bites are from.

Sadly, on our whale watching tour I didn't get a lot of great pictures--most of them look pretty much like this. Henry was lucky enough to have his camera out during the outdoor adventure and got a great picture of the whale breaching on the way back, which puts this to shame.