So the two main things in The Artist’s Way are morning pages, which I’ve been doing religiously, and the “artist dates”, which I haven’t done yet.

An artist date is something you do weekly, for an hour or so (keeping in mind that The Artist’s Way is mostly intended for people who have a 9-5 job), to “stock your pond” or “fill your well”.  I like the fish stocking analogy better, so when you’re on your artist date, you’re supposed to do things like go to a museum or a movie or Starbucks or an art gallery or an art supply store – anywhere where you may see things in an artistic perspective.

To me, that’s pretty much everywhere. I have an eagle’s eye for detail and the appreciation of the beautiful people and things around me but the other part of the artist dates is that spouses aren’t invited. She even says so in the book. Artist dates are something you have to do by yourself. Also the closest museum that I would have any interest in is in Toronto and I’m pretty sure most of the galleries around here are watercolour landscapes. I’d put money on it.

So we’re going to do the artist dates a little different. Blake’s going to give me $10 cash every week and I’m going to use that money for my artist date. Gas to get there doesn’t count with my $10. All we can afford is $10 (and barely that) but I think that’s a good number anyway because these artist dates are supposed to be FUN, not a source of grief, so $10 it is. And Blake’s coming with me because I have no other choice, really, and I don’t think he’ll detract from the exercise.

On your artist date, you’re supposed to go places that inspire you, that allow you to take mental pictures of things because as an artist, you need to “restock your pond”, you have to add mental images to your imagination. Creativity is one thing but inspiration is another. All artists paint what they see or what they have seen. Some may argue that some artists, like Jackson Pollock for example, paint from within themselves but even then, they’re painting things they’ve seen or experienced in the past because they *have* to. (Although in my opinion, Jackson Pollock made paintings that “look cool” and he got swept up in other factors that made him famous – BUT THAT’S JUST ME. I still like him though and I watch the biopic about him regularly.)

Anyway, I need to restock my pond. I need brand new little fishies swimming around in my head.

But I don’t know where to go for $10! Starbucks is a given and Blake even said that he’d drop me off there and come back for me in an hour if I actually wanted to sit down and people watch but I don’t think I could do that so he’d have to stay with me and do that. Starbucks is in the same plaza as Michael’s and I could spend many many artist dates at Michael’s. For example, I could take my $10 and use it to buy ONE THING, like blow the whole wad on ONE THING, then come home and make something with it. The reason I’d do that is because I would probably never, in a million years, pay $10 for one thing EVER, unless it’s a basic supply like varnish or gel medium or gesso etc. I’m thinking about buying ONE of the Martha Stewart scrapbooking stickers that’s really elaborate and make a card with it. Or a book mark. Those are like, $8 a piece. Or even buy TWO pieces of Martha Stewart scrapbooking paper, which are very nice but very expensive.

At Michael’s I could also challenge myself every week to go down an aisle I’ve never gone down before. Really, all I do now is go to the paint section, the jewels section, the scrapbooking paper section, the ribbon section, and the Martha Stewart scrapbooking section. It’s a HUGE store with at least 10 other aisles that I’ve never been in!

I could do similar things in Curry’s but Curry’s is more of a fine arts store and it’s pretty boring because I wouldn’t know the first thing about 75% of what’s in there BUT they do sell Golden Acrylic paint which is very expensive but I could maybe buy ONE 1oz. bottle of a colour and challenge myself to only use that colour and black & white to make something. They also sell Gelly Rolls gel pens. I have a few but could use a few more colours (all I have is a silver that doesn’t work and metallic pink). I’m not sure what the challenge could be with those but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Do you guys have any ideas as to what I can do on my artist dates for $10 or less? I’d love to hear it! (But keep in mind that I’m in Canada and things are a little bit more expensive up here, unfortunately.)

Now I’m off to watch the Toddlers & Tiaras season finale that I missed last night and do those damn morning pages. But first I think I need waffles.

Happy Thursday!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

Tomorrow is TUESDAY, which means, no nurses, no kids and no Blake – it’s my DAY OFF! I’m so stoked! Here is what tomorrow will ideally entail because I do better with structured days than unstructured ones:

• Morning pages (I’m doing The Artist’s Way again. Last time I did it for a week and gave up, this time I’m doing it for real because I think the crux of my depression is that I’m creatively blocked. Very little makes me unhappier.)
• Waffles with REAL maple syrup (because my mommy loves me) and butter
• Moulin Rouge and sketching (I got brightly coloured feathers on my last trip to Michael’s and I want to use them in a burlesque painting)
• Burlesque (with Xtina Aguilera) and more sketching
• Figure out what to do with BEADS. If anyone has any idea on what I could do with brightly coloured glass seed beads, I’d love to hear it. I mean like, in my paintings, not in general. They were on clearance in tubes for $1 at Michael’s a while back, good quality ones too, so I got a whole bunch of them  and they’re really really pretty. The only thing I’ve been able to think of for them is to make them gravel in mermaid paintings. There’s gotta be a better use for them.
• Read The Artist’s Way for at least an hour.
• Read Painted Pages, which came today, for at least an hour.
• By that time, the kids should be home, so I’m going to see if Madison wants to watch The Sweetest Thing because that was the movie I won in the grocery store’s colouring contest (actually it’s 3 movies on 1 disc but the other two are stupid; Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and My Best Friend’s Wedding)
• While we watch the movie, I’ll finish my last Sketchbook Project sketchbook page.
• Salmon steak and salad for dinner

Then the rest of the evening is a mystery! I know I’ll watch something with Blake, maybe The Tempest if there’s nothing else on TV because I know we have that downloaded and maybe we have The Ides of March too (I hope so, Ryan gosling, rawr) but whatever we watch, I’ll be working on Argent’s painting, which is fast becoming the bane of my existence because I keep FUCKING IT UP but hopefully tomorrow I’ll get a handle on it.

Tonight we’re having steak and grilled garlicy buttery potatoes for dinner (with peas!), and the Leafs are playing the godforsaken Islanders and we’re gonna win GODAMMIT and that’s all I have to say about that.

Today was pretty uneventful. I sat in my office all day and watched Oprah-related television while I wrote in my Artist’s Way workbook about my issues right now involving all things creative, then I started reading The Artist’s Way from the beginning because the last time I picked it up, according to my last morning pages, was the winter of 2005 and that was before I went nuts and considering I remember very little in this house before I went nuts, I figured I should just start all over again instead of where my bookmark had left off. Evidently I only read a chapter of the book the first time around too. No wonder it didn’t help me.

Janice was my nurse today. I like Janice, she’s nice and bubbly and funny and probably my favourite out of all of them. She also listens to me, for the most part, whereas the others don’t really. :o/

Anyway, I spent most of my day away from the internet and it was pretty great, so I think I’ll do the same tomorrow. I need to have better days than the ones I’ve been having, that’s for sure.

Have a lovely evening!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~

Yesterday was a pretty good day. :o) I woke up to sunshine streaming through the front windows of the house, I was warm, I was alone (for the time being) because Blake was at work and the kids were at school and I just knew it was going to be a good day.

Around 9am, Cheryl, one of my nurses, was scheduled to come do my dressing, which the night before I was really pissy about because I didn’t want to get up early but I was glad for it when I saw the sunrise. God I love sunrise.

As I was looking out the window at bliss, the phone rang and it was my mom. She said that I should check my e-mail very carefully because she got her Squam registration e-mail. I checked and checked and checked but I didn’t get one yet. My mom said hers said that I was her roommate and that we were staying in the Longhouse, which I know is a 13+ person cabin. Let the games begin! I cannot even imagine the fights to use the bathrooms haha I will most definitely be bringing my Lush “No Drought” dry shampoo! Since my mom’s e-mail said I was her roommate, I’m assuming my e-mail will be coming shortly. So excited!

After I got off the phone with my mom, Cheryl came and that was pretty uneventful. Cheryl is a smoker and she tries to cover up the smell of the cigarettes with perfume, which just makes it worse. When she leans over me to change my dressing, it smells and I can’t stand it. Also, she comes early and I hate that, whereas Janice and Siske come in the afternoon (and they don’t smoke). BUT since I had such a great day yesterday, I’m thinking getting up early isn’t a totally horrible thing to do on “office days” (days where I stay in my office the whole day making art, as opposed to the living room/computer).

After Cheryl left, I made waffles with the REAL maple syrup my mom got me for Christmas, which is one of my favourite things in the world (if you’ve never had real maple syrup, I truly feel sorry for you because it is one of the Earth’s most wonderful treasures) and I brought them into my office and started flipping around to see what was on TV. I watched Wife Swap, the UK version, which was nice and trashy but as always, one of the moms had a revelation that her life sucked and they all became friends and it was heartwarming.

After that, I took my plate into the kitchen, filled up my drink and came back to my office to make some ~*SERIOUS ART*~ (not really) while I watched…something. I honestly don’t remember what. Something that was an hour long and was probably a talk show. Whatever it was, I worked on Argent’s painting as I watched (or more to the point, listened). Argent’s painting is turning out to be a royal pain in my ass and I can’t wait until it’s finished and out of my house! EVERYTHING I’ve tried to do with it has failed miserably and I’ve had to make corrections like crazy. It’s making me mental! But it’s almost finished and I think he’ll be happy with it and that’s all that matters.

Once Argent’s painting was in a state of “no touchies”, I started working on my girl who will be on my last page of the Sketchbook Project sketchbook.

I think I watched Ellen while I was doing this and Colin Firth and the little dog from the movie The Artist were on it. Colin was very animated and talking about Gary Oldman being “hung like a water buffalo” and the little dog was very charming. Truthfully though, I can’t see myself seeing either of their movies. Just not interested.

After that, was The View. I like this show a lot, I’ve always been a Whoopi fan, but I don’t normally watch it because when I was working, I didn’t watch TV at the same time, and after I got sick and now that I’m home all day with my thumb up my ass, I spend most of my time in front of the computer which is something I’m hoping to change and yesterday was the first step.

(Paper peony)

On The View, the women did their hot topics but they weren’t all that interesting or I’d be able to tell you what they talked about. I know there was a story where Sheri was on a plane and Courtney Love was there with a short skirt and no underbums and she caused quite a ruckus. Their guest was an old guy from that Tom Hanks/911 movie I have no interest in. I just listened and worked on my girl.

Then it was Dr. Phil and boy, what a show. o_O They had on there a guy who was into infantilism. He liked to act like an 18 month old, sleep in a crib, play with baby toys, act like a baby, eat in a high chair and wear diapers. He had a regular job at a “big box store” working nights, but when he got home in the morning, he’d put on his onesie, hop in the high chair and his poor girlfriend would feed him and change his shitty diaper. I felt so bad for her. She was doing everything for him and he never did anything for her, like nothing, and Dr. Phil was like, “are you having a relationship with an 18 month old or a 24 year old?” and the answer was an 18 month old. And she said she wanted to marry this guy and have kids with him one day, but only if he could “tone things down”, which Dr. Phil said would not happen no matter what the guy said. And it wasn’t even a sexual thing, the guy didn’t get OFF on being a baby, that’s just how he felt naturally. Which I think is weird, but fine, it’s not hurting anyone EXCEPT your significant other who you’re lying to about it and basically using. He needs to find someone whose thing in life is wanting to take care of an adult baby and that girl needs to run away as fast as she can in the opposite direction because he will never change and things will only get worse as he takes it farther and farther.

Normally I don’t watch Dr. Phil because I think it’s pretty trashy and only a few degrees away from being Jerry Springer, but if there’s nothing else on or if the topic is interesting, I’ll watch. Yesterday’s was interesting.

By then it was 4pm and the kids came burting through the door just as a Roseanne rerun came on. They asked me what the show was about and I said it was about a family a lot like ours. They decided to watch it with me and they wanted to know who in the show was like who of us in real life. I said that I was Roseanne, Blake was Dan (obviously), Becky was Madison and Wes was DJ. I also told them that it was probably the best sitcom to ever grace the airwaves. Wes was really into it (it was the episode where it was Dan and Roseanne’s 20th wedding anniversary and he took a part-time job to pay for her present) and Madison not so much. Right after the first episode there was another episode so we watched that one too and in that one, Darlene and David break up because Molly kissed David and Madison got more into it because David is on Big Bang Theory and apparently so is Darlene. This, along with Mayim Bialik, makes me think I should give that show a second chance because when I first watched it, I just wasn’t into it but everyone I know loves it and the various clips I’ve seen online of it, I really liked.

Anyway…after Roseanne, it was Golden Girls, which I knew the kids wouldn’t be so much into (although I was into Golden Girls when I was their age) but they watched it with me anyway. The two episodes we watched weren’t very good ones (one where they were remodeling the garage and Rose is dating Mr. Terrific and the other was where Rose’s boyfriend retires and wants to sail around the world) but I explained to Madison, who’s very interested in gay issues and equality, that the Golden Girls was an extremely progressive show for its time because Blanche’s son was gay and they had some episodes dealing with that, but also the show itself was about women at a time in their lives that you just didn’t – and still don’t, really – see on TV. This made her more interested in the show, but only snippets found on YouTube, not the actual episodes. I’d still really like to get the whole series on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was probably my 2nd favourite sitcom of all time.

By the time the Golden Girls was over, I’d finished my girl and stuck her in the sketchbook and today I’ll give her arms, sew the trim on her dress and give her a quote. Then all I have to do on the sketchbook is a girl for the cover and then I’m finished! YAY!

The only difference between this pic and the one above is that I inked her hair and legs/feet.
She’s just so damn pretty, I wanted to post her twice!

After Golden Girls, Wes went into the living room to watch Pokemon, which he’s obsessed with (by the way, his birthday is in 3 weeks if anyone was planning on getting him anything – e-mail me if you need our address), and I flipped around channels to see what I could find. Blake and Madison were going to the high school for like, a parent/teacher transition night type of thing  so I took that opportunity to watch something Blake would never in a million years watch with me: Toddlers & Tiaras.

I can’t help it. I love this show. I never know when it’s on, so I don’t watch it all the time or anything but every episode I’ve seen I’ve really liked. I think that show falls into 3 categories: ones where the kids are total brats to their parents on camera and therefore the episode is funny because it makes their parents look like losers, ones where the kids are really into the whole pageant and they’re just cute as hell and ones where their parents look like monsters and you feel sorry for the kids. Yesterday I saw 2 of the above.

The first one I watched was where the theme for the pageant was Groovy Girls. Or maybe that was the pageant’s name, I’m not sure. Either way, there were 3 categories in the pageant: beauty, costume of choice and one other one I forget the name of and the pageant was “full glitz”, which means that the girls had acrylic nails, spray tans and “flippers” which are like fake teeth. In this episode, all of the girls were actually really into the pageants and they were old enough to choose that this is what they wanted to do. The mothers weren’t overbearing at all, they were just supportive and this was just what they chose to do with their daughter, like any other family would do hockey or soccer. I *DO NOT* like the spray tanning and acrylic nails and fake teeth, I think that’s dumb, but it’s part of the competition, just like shin guards and helmets and sticks and shoes, so as long as the kid’s okay with it, and all these ones were, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with the makeup either, a lot of little girls like to play with and wear makeup. And as long as the kids are GOOD winners and losers, I don’t have a problem with it. In this show, two of the girls who apparently compete a lot and win and lose to each other all the time, are actually friends. I liked that.

Anyway, seeing the girls in their little bell bottoms and vests and sunglasses and go go boots and stuff like that was sooooooo cute. I especially liked seeing like, the 18 month – 2 year olds all dressed up in their little costumes, they were just adorable. And really,  thinking these kids were cute in their costumes is no different than Halloween. The whole show was just cute little girls being cute little girls and I enjoyed the show immensely, enough to watch a new episode that aired at 10pm.

The one I watched at 10pm was vastly different than the one I watched earlier. The one at 10 had horrible parents pushong their kids to do this when they really didn’t want to do it. The one little girl was SICK and feeling like crap but her mom made her compete anyway because the grand prize was $10,000. This mom made the poor little girl not wear her glasses when she was on stage and then belittled her when the little girl didn’t do her routine – which she’d only learned 2 DAYS prior – because the girl couldn’t see the judges or her mother in the audience telling her what to do. Then another mother, who was a hardcore Russian immigrant, was just a monster. He would withhold her daughter’s favourite stuffed bear, “Micha”, and only give it to her when she had to do pageants because apparently when the little girl held and played with Micha, her thumb would go in her mouth and this is how they stopped it. The little girl, Mia, would only get to play with Micha at pageants and seeing the reaction of the girl, who was only 4, when she got to see Micha, it was just heartbreaking. I almost cried. She was just so happy to see her friend again. Then in one of the cutaways, Mia said to the camera, “I want to do good at the pageant because that’s how I know my mommy loves me” or something like that and I *DID* cry, it was just so horrible. And worse? When Mia was on stage doing her beauty routine, she wasn’t listening to the emcee who was kinda like telling her to get off the stage but nicely and Mia’s mom flipped out and started screaming in their hotel room that the emcee hated Mia and that they had to “forget about it” (winning) and that they should just go home. In the end, Mia won a high title and $500 and the FIRST THING she wanted to do when she won was to show her mother and her mother PUSHED HER AWAY. OMG my poor heart. :o( That woman was just a horrible person and she was so blessed to have such an adorable, loving little girl and she didn’t even appreciate her in the slightest. If I can find a clip, I will show you this awful woman so you can wretch with me.

In between episodes of Toddlers & Tiaras, I actually watched a show called “I Cloned My Pet” which was the most pathetic hour of television I have ever watched in my whole entire life. These people were all fucked in the head. There was literally nothing else on except a rerun of the same Wife Swap I’d watched in the morning and that’s the only reason I watched this extremely stupid show.  EXTREMELY stupid.

After that my choices were a show about hoarding or American Idol and because hoarding shows just piss me off because the world just does not need that much excess, I chose American Idol because as much as that show bugs me, I have to admit, the auditions at the beginning of each season are always entertaining.

As I watched American Idol, I started working on an art journal page that uses vellum as bubbles which is a technique I’ve used before and I’ve always really liked, but the only vellum I had on hand was green, yellow, orange and red so my bubbles actually look a lot more like polkadots (hmmm, polkadots are also apparently two words OR one word and they have their own Wikipedia entry). It’s not finished yet and it was night by the time I started working on it which meant that the light in my office was garbage so I figured I’d work on it again today and take pictures of it tomorrow when it was finished. I have absolutely no idea what to write on the page, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd that was my (mostly) internet-free day yesterday in support of the SOPA protest! I will say one thing though: I didn’t tweet yesterday because Twitter was supposed to be part of the black out but I had TweetDeck up just out of habit and I was really disappointed by some people who I *know* knew about the blackout and who tweeted inane bullshit anyway. Some people retweeted SOPA-related things instead of posting which was better than what other people were posting, I guess, but posting at all is the opposite of the concept of a “blackout”. I really, truly thought my Twitter feed would have been completely dark yesterday but it wasn’t and it’s making me evaluate who’s on my feed and why. There are some folks I have on there who I’ve kept just to be nice, but they’re not nice to me back or they don’t interact with me so I wonder why I bother. Soooooooo, I think over the next few days, there are definitely going to be some cuts. Hopefully people won’t make a big issue about it.

Okay, going to go to my office now…WAIT, one more thing! Apparently my posts aren’t always showing up on peoples’ LJ friends lists for some reason and I don’t know if it’s my x-poster or if it’s Live Journal but I’ll x-post an entry and it’ll go through fine, but when I go to edit a post via WordPress and click “update” it’ll tell me that my password for LJ is wrong (it’s not!) and it’ll only update the version on my site. So I dunno what’s up with that. Also when I go to a Live Journal entry and manually edit a post’s userpic and mood, which I do with everything I post, I’ll come back a few hours later and the post will be back to my default userpic. The mood will still be set to what I changed it to, but the userpic will be default. So I dunno WHAT the hell is going on but if you guys on LJ don’t hear from me for a few  days, either check my actual LJ or my site. I *think* the error is with LJ because they were having a lot of problems over the weekend so I’m just waiting for them to fix their shit before I investigate further.

NOW I’m going to my office! Happy Thursday!

~*Please donate!*~

Remember in my last post when I said I’d been having pains in my stomach for the past few days? Well it persisted all throughout yesterday evening and since the doctor told me I should go to the hospital if it did and Blake would be in Toronto all day today, we decided it would be a good idea to have me checked out. It would be a very bad thing if I had pancreatitis again and I was at home all alone.

So at about 8:30pm or so, I packed up the iPad, my chargers, my toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, my journal and a couple of pens just in case they admitted me and off we went to Midland, which is about 20 minutes North of us and is the same hospital I went to in June and again when I had pneumonia this fall.

We got there and did intake and everything was okay. We waited about half an hour in the waiting room and then they called us into the back of the ER where I saw a doctor who asked me how I was feeling, why I was there; we told him the whole pancreatitis story and that we were there to make sure it was NOT that again because the pain was in the same place and was the same kind of pain that started the whole thing last time. He asked me if I wanted anything for the pain and I said no because I’d already taken hydromorph before I came and I didn’t want a needle (I’ve seen this doctor before and he likes to give out the morphine like it was candy). He asked if I was nauseous and I was, so they gave me Zofran which knocked me on my ass and I fought off falling asleep (they had me laying on a table on my back and the room was dim).

They wanted to check my pancreatic levels (because I guess if you have pancreatitis your pancreas juice levels go up, so you don’t have to do an ultrasound right away)  so this really bitchy nurse used the biggest needle at her disposal to take my blood as roughly as possible. Then they said it would take about an hour to get the results so I fell asleep and Blake e-mailed my mom.

I woke up at about 1am because a new doctor came in and he told us that my pancreatic levels were fine and so was everything else. He said he didn’t know what the pain could be, that it was possible it was gall stones, but there’s not a whole lot they can do about those so take some drugs and bear it the best you can and if it’s too much, come back for stronger drugs. And truthfully, the pain is manageable with the hydromorph contin, Tylenol 1 and ibuprofen, but we were concerned it was pancreatitis again, so that’s why we went. I’m not fucking around with that shit ever again, if I’m in pain, I’m seeing a doctor.

So we were out of there by about 1:30am, we went to Tim Hortons so Blake could get a coffee and a muffin because he was tired and neither of us had had dinner. I got a ginger molasses cookie and a Pepsi. I hadn’t had a Pepsi in YEARS and the first sip transported me back to riding in the carpet van with my grampa, on our way to Alliston because I was skipping school to spend the day with him at the store. He had a mini fridge in his van that plugged into the cigarette lighter and it was full of Pepsi.

Anyway, that’s what happened at the hospital. As is the way of things, I’m not in any pain today and I feel totally fine. I think the Zofran they gave me settled whatever was going on in my stomach and now I’m totally okay. Or maybe it was a gall stone and it’s passed now. I have no idea, I just know I feel as normal as normal can be. *shrug*

This morning I ate waffles while reading some of Daisy Yellow’s older posts and I found this one on art journaling very helpful so I thought I’d share. Art journaling, as I’ve mentioned before, is something I’m really really bad at. I just can ‘ot do it.

For most of my life, I’ve written hypergraphically. That means that you write compulsively. Ever since I’ve been taking psychiatric medications, I don’t really write hypergraphically any more, not like I did anyway. I still blather on on the internet of course, but I don’t compulsively write in my journal for 6 hours straight like I used to. BUT, I read these art journaling blogs, like Daisy Yellow’s (I don’t know her name) and Jazmin’s, and I get jealous because when they die, they’re going to leave behind all these gorgeously decorated journals for their family members to read and keep for generations and here mine are, all text in my crappy printing. I mean, there are a lot of them, and I think most of them are pretty interesting (and so do other people, I once sold a journal for $200 which I think was a bargain on his part) but they’re not really aesthetically pleasing. The journals themselves are nice, I don’t cheap out on those unless I have to and most of them were gifts (my favourites are by PAPERBLANKS, in case anyone ever wanted to get me one and mail it, they’re simply the best and you can get them at Chapters or any big box book store *cough*), but inside is just text text text, usually in black pen, although the one I’m using right now has pink flowers on it so I only write in it with pink pen. I have a matching blue one that I haven’t used yet and I’ll only use blue pen in that one. In fact I bought coloured pens specifically to write in these journals because that’s how obsessive I am about them.

That said, I’d really like to have beautifully crafted journals like my online art friends’ but I just don’t really know how and when I’ve tried, it’s just looked stupid. Like, it could take me all day to paint/collage/whatever a spread, which is two facing pages, but what I want to write may be TEN pages, so that just doesn’t work for me. Or by the time I’m finished the spread, I don’t feel the way I did when I started it. For example, one day I tried making an art journal spread because I’d sold a painting and in that moment, I felt successful. So I started making this spread about that but I didn’t get finished until a day later and by then, I didn’t feel that way any more and because I didn’t feel that way any more, I didn’t know what to write that would be authentic. I probably should have written what I wanted to and art journaled around it or something, but that’s not the way most people do it so that thought never occurred to me until just this moment.

It frustrates me greatly. :o/

Less Herger of Comfortable Shoes Studio, retweeted today a tweet from Derwent, which is the company who makes the watercolour pencils and the Inktense pencils I use and this is what it said:

@derwentpencils Don’t let your work become precious. Be bold, experiment, make lots of mistakes. It’s the only way to learn, and it’s fun!

(Actually, the way the tweet was worded, I think it was said to Derwent by a woman named Kathe Parker in response to them asking “what would be your best advice to someone starting out in drawing & painting?”.)

This advice is something I have a lot of trouble with and this is part of the reason why I need to go to Squam so desperately.

I’m poor. I’ve been poor my whole life. When I was little, I was NEVER EVER allowed in my mom’s art room and I was NEVER EVER allowed to touch her materials because we were poor and art supplies are expensive. Too expensive for a kid to use and fuck up with. I was given Crayolas and a pad of paper. I wanted paint but it was too messy and too expensive. I wanted to paint on wood, but it was too expensive and selling her creations was how my mom paid for Christmas and anything “extra”. I wanted to sew, but my mom didn’t have the time to teach me how. Etc etc etc. (I am not *blaming* my mother for anything here, just stating facts.)

So when I grew up and had my own house and my own “art room” and my own art supplies,  everything because “precious” because if I fucked up, I couldn’t afford to replace the materials I fucked up with. I couldn’t just throw supplies in the garbage like that. I still can’t. We have no money. When I sell a painting, at LEAST 75% goes back into buying more supplies because that’s the only way I can afford to have these things and art supplies (and Lush) are really the only things I buy myself. (Of course I bought more stuff when I had a job, I’m talking about when I don’t.) My supplies ARE “precious”. I really really wish they weren’t but they are. I don’t know how these people can pay $20+ for a 4oz bottle of Golden Fluid Acrylic paint because it’s “the best” and then just trash what they’ve made if it’s not what they were trying to do. I just cannot wrap my head around that. I buy Americana paint for $2.99 or, if I’m splurging, $4.99 for Martha Stewart, and I *still* can’t wrap my head around just trashing something if I screw up. Imperfect things really really bother me and so does waste. When I put too much paint on my palette, I use a paintbrush and scoop it all back into the bottle when I’m done, even if it’s black or white, which I buy in big bottles because I use them the most and they’re inexpensive. I just can’t waste the paint. If I were using Golden, I’m not sure I could bring myself to even squeeze any onto my palette at all, I think I’d have to like, squirt tiny amounts onto my brush or something.

Another blog I was reading that was linked on the Squam website talked about things not being “precious” too so I think this may be a concept that someone has written about in a book or something (considering most of the teachers at Squam are published authors) because it seems to be a theme within the mixed media community. I see it popping up all over the place now and I think it’s something I really need to learn. I *do* use inexpensive paint. It really *isn’t* a big deal if I mess up and have to throw away a piece of artwork. As much as it would pain me, a canvas is really only about $6 and if I fuck it up too badly, I can always paint over it, all I need to do is invest in some good gesso.

I need to start making art that isn’t so “safe”. I need to also start making art that’s just for me, like in an art journal. Don’t get me wrong, I *LOVE* my girls. I love making them, I love how beautiful they are, I almost always love the finished product and I don’t intend to stop making them, but I think I need to make other art that’s more accessible too. Or something. I’m not really sure what I need to do, honestly, which is why I’m hoping Squam will crack me wide open. I need to not be so obsessive with everything being perfect on the first try so I don’t waste anything. Like time. I need to not be so obsessive about wasting time as well. Oh god, I have so much to learn! Anyone who thinks art isn’t work can shove their opinion straight up their own ass.  Sideways.

I’m probably channeling my inner Madison by saying this, but god dammit, art is agony! I love it, I hate it, I’m frustrated by it, it makes me cry, it makes me happy, it makes me a motherfucking MESS. Maybe it’s because I’m mentally ill that it makes me so emotional but I don’t understand these artists who are just happy and make happy art and nice little YouTube videos to entertain each other and to learn from each other and here I am, sitting in a dark corner clutching my sketchbook for dear life, unable to move. I want to be like them, I just don’t know how. I’m afraid it’s just not even in my DNA.

I have no idea what my mother’s creative process is. I’ve never really actually watched her paint (except when she was teaching classes) and I’m not there on a day-to-day basis to see like, how she is mentally but in general I think she’s a happy creator in that, I’ve seen her come up with an idea and get really excited about it and have to do it immediately. I’m like that too, when I have what I think is a good idea, I have to get it down on paper right away, even if I only have enough time to do a rough sketch. Then the next day I’ll begin working on the actual piece and obsess until it’s finished. And I do it perfectly the first time almost always. I can honestly say that I’ve only wasted a half sheet of watercolour paper twice in my life (I draw/paint my girls on watercolour paper and adhere them to the canvas with gel medium) because I just do everything in my power not to fuck up because watercolour paper is expensive. I mean, in my first grant proposal, I told them that my dream was to be able to afford 5 different watercolour pads so I could work on 5 paintings at a time. That’s pretty pathetic (no wonder I didn’t get the grant), don’t you think? I currently have 2 watercolour pads and since I draw my girls on half sheets now, I can work on 4 of them at a time, theoretically (I’m not that productive).

My friend Shoshanna Bauer does these really amazing watercolours, you should check her out, I think she’s extremely good at what she does. I would really like to play with watercolours, I like how they look, but I have no idea what I would paint or how you do it. No one’s ever taught me. I’ve looked at a lot of watercolours over the last couple of years trying to dissect them, and I’ve come to the conclusion that watercolours are REALLY fucking hard! Without even trying them, I just know that they’re really fucking hard and to make anything even remotely nice, I’m going to have to waste like, a whole pad of watercolour paper trying to figure them out and that’s expensive! Or at least that’s expensive to ME! And I don’t even HAVE watercolours. I have watercolour pencils, a very small selection of them that someone gave me a long time ago, and I have Inktense pencils, a large case of them, which work very similarly to watercolours (although I don’t think you can do the “salt trick” with Inktense pencils) but I have absolutely no idea how to use them.

I’ve always avoided watercolours because of their impermanence. If you’ve been reading my blog for any great amount of time, you’ll know that I’m obsessed with my art’s longevity. I want my shit to survive WWIII, plain & simple. I varnish the hell out of everything. I use materials that won’t fade, won’t run, won’t smear, are acid-free, archival and will do as they’re told. If you spill a Coke on a watercolour painting, it’s ruined. If you somehow spilled a Coke on one of my paintings, it would roll right off and you could gently wipe it down with a damp cloth. The idea of my hard work being able to basically be erased in a matter of seconds irrationally freaks me out! I’ve varnished watercolour before, but you have to be really really careful with it and you can only use a spray. Anyway, that’s why I plan on taking my watercolours to Squam. Maybe someone there can show me how to use them.

Having said that, I think it’s time for me to talk some more about Squam, as if you haven’t heard enough…I’ve finally sat down and made a list of expenses relating to the trip and if you could spare anything between now and September, it would be GREATLY appreciated. Like maybe for my birthday, which is March 1st? Or if buying a gift is more your style, I would really like this book by one of the teachers I’ll be in class with at Squam, called Painted Pages: Fueling Creativity with Sketchbooks and Mixed Media (by Sarah Ahearn Bellemare), which is on my wishlist. That would be appreciated also.

Here’s what I’ll need (okay maybe one or two is more of a want…):

• Tuition: $1200
• Gas: $200
• An apron: $12
• Fairy wings: $20…
• A Rubbermaid container for all my crap: $10
• Gesso: $10
• Gel medium: $10
• Umbrella: $12
• Flashlight with extra batteries: $15?
• Bug spray: $10
• Paint: $25
• Kit fees: $12
• Eating out on the Saturday night they make us fend for ourselves: $20
• Two cases of Diet Coke & snacks: $25
• Art fair: $75 (tops)
  = $1656

I do not own a tiara. Strange but true.

Who remembers this show?

“I love you in the morning and in the afternoon! I love you in the evening underneath the moon!”

Meet Anxiety Cat.

Swap Xanax for Ativan and that would be me.

This one is also me.
I pretty much only pick up the phone if Blake’s # shows up. Or the school.

So not much new is really going on in Sunnyland. The kids started school this week. Wes is happy with his teacher and classroom arrangement whereas Madison is not because she’s in the 7/8 split and “none” of her friends, including her boyfriend, are in her class. She’ll get over it and hopefully she’ll have a smarter, more attractive, classier boyfriend soon. (Although I’m not holding my breath, in this town the pickings are pretty damn slim.)

I just wrote a few paragraphs trash talking Madison’s boyfriend and his family, but I deleted it because that wouldn’t be very classy of me. Just know that I’m not at all happy with Madison’s selection in light of the fact that I’m pretty sure she’s dating the boy’s mother more than the boy. And I’ll leave it at that.

Onto other things…

So, most of my time is spent in this bed in the living room and today I got Blake to charge the batteries in my camera, which died while I was unconscious, so I could start a feature in blog posts or maybe just one big blog post where it’s just “scenes from my bed”. I’m sure I’ll get bored with it pretty damn fast but at the same time, I’m pretty damn bored and this is just a way for me to make things more interesting. Chances are, all I’m going to end up with are a million photos of my dogs begging for food. SO BE IT.

So that was my genius idea of the day. Bask in its glory.

I worked on a page in my Sketchbook Project 2012 sketchbook this week using Derwent’s Inktense pencil crayons because I can’t exactly haul a whole ton of paint into my bed and so far it’s turning out pretty good. It’s a 2 page layout, a drawing of a girl with rainbow hair. All she needs to be finished is a dress but I need to get into my office and sitting at my desk to make that happen because that’s where all of my scrapbook paper is, so that’s my plan for the weekend: to get this page finished. Oh and the background of the page is black so I was going to add stars using my silver pen.

My Sketchbook Project theme is the same as last year’s, “Untitled”, so I can really do anything. I learned last year that my metallic paints, which I love so much, don’t do well in these scrapbooks because the pages stick together, so since they’re out of the equation, I have to learn some new tricks and adapt. Varnish also didn’t work so well for me last year and I can’t stand the feel of acrylic paint without it, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I don’t think I’m going to be able to complete the whole book without using acrylic paint because that’s just what I use, so I’m going to have to figure something out.

I entered 6 paintings into Touched By Fire, despite knowing full well that I won’t get in because my work’s not moody or emo enough for that show. Sure, they embraced me with open arms the first time I submitted because my work was manic and angsty and representative of bipolar disorder but as soon as I GET BETTER and start creating more cohesive works, they want nothing to do with me. (But they have no problem asking me to donate my artwork for their cause. “No, you’re not good enough to be in the show, but how about you give us your hard work for free? Thanks!” I don’t fucking think so and I hope very few artists agree to that. They just started that crap and I’m hoping it was so unsuccessful that they won’t ask again this year.)

Speaking of being an artist, that’s all I am now. That’s my only job. I don’t have a job to come back to. Somehow my boss got the impression that after I got out of the hospital I wouldn’t want to work because certain people took it upon themselves to speak for me without speaking TO me, and she hired 2 girls full-time to replace me. Now before you all get upset about the fact that not having a job to come home to after being sick is super illegal, it’s not when you’re a sub-contractor and the company you work for is in another country. Also, they HAD to replace me, what were they going to do while I was out indefinitely? The other existing 2 girls couldn’t cover my share of the work, especially for that long, so they had no choice but to hire extra help. I’ve e-mailed my boss and asked her to keep me in mind if anything opens up after I’m recovered from my surgery (still not sure when that’s going to be though) and that’s really all I can do.

I’m pretty upset that I don’t have a job anymore and really pissed off that certain people would have said those things without speaking to me first, especially because every waking moment when I was in the ICU, I was crying and scared that I wouldn’t have a job to come home to and Blake told me to stop worrying about that, that he’d been e-mailing with my boss the whole time and that I had nothing to worry about. Talk about a slap in the face to come home and find out otherwise.

I’m extremely worried about money. We know that we can scrape by on one income, but it really fucking sucks to have to. Moving is going to have to be postponed indefinitely, so Blake’s going to have to commute 4 hours a day indefinitely. All winter. Probably for several winters.

Until I have the surgery to close my cheese pizza wound, remove my gall bladder and fix the hernia that’s making my guts fall out all over the place – and then recover from that – I won’t be re-opening my Etsy shop. Blake doesn’t know how to print invoices and shipping labels or how to pack paintings and I’m in no position to do that stuff myself at the moment or the very near future, so the shop is going to remain closed.

I wasn’t going to apply for the Emerging Artist grant this year because I’m sick of them rejecting me but if the deadline hasn’t passed then I think I’m going to because putting food on the table is part of being an artist and we really need the money.

The good news is that I got loan forgiveness on my student loans, so we don’t have those to worry about and right now the only debt we have right now is the house and car, but still, things are gonna be pretty tight.

Anyway, enough about that crap, it’s bumming me out.

My cheese pizza wound is getting noticeably smaller with the help of the vac dressing. I *believe* that when I was in the ICU at RVH, it was 26cm across and that would have been about 6 weeks ago that they told me the measurements. I forget how long it was. Now it’s 17.5cm across with no scarring whatsoever and 12.5cm long. The skin where the wound used to be just looks like normal skin. The only thing that’s weird about it is that my bellybutton is still a few centimeters to the left of the wound.

I go to see the surgeon who will be slicing and dicing me on October 4th so I’ll have more information after that. The surgeon in Toronto doesn’t feel a follow up is needed. Originally the surgeon up here wanted me to follow up with him because I have pancreatic pseudocysts but Blake figures if they were a big deal, I’d still be in the hospital, which is a very good point.

Today I was on Wikipedia reading about pancreatitis and these 2 complications are basically what happened to me:

• Dehydration, and kidney failure (resulting from inadequate blood volume which, in turn, may result from a combination of fluid loss from vomiting, internal bleeding, or oozing of fluid from the circulation into the abdominal cavity in response to the pancreas inflammation, a phenomenon known as third spacing).
• Respiratory complications are frequent and are major contributors to the mortality of pancreatitis. Some degree of pleural effusion is almost ubiquitous in pancreatitis. Some or all of the lungs may collapse (atelectasis) as a result of the shallow breathing which occurs because of the abdominal pain. Pneumonitis may occur as a result of pancreatic enzymes directly damaging the lung or simply as a final common pathway response to any major insult to the body (i.e., ARDS or acute respiratory distress syndrome).

But I know that as soon as I actually have time to sit down and write it, I’ll forget.

This weekend was great. I finished The Witching Hour by Anne Rice and now I’m working on the new Sookie Stackhouse book. After reading so much literature the past few months, the difference between that and Charlaine Harris is glaring. The woman is NOT a good writer, in fact I’m finding her characters and storylines more annoying as she goes along than anything else. “Book Sookie” is annoying as shit and I’d probably punch her in the face if I met her in person. I feel like I’ve said that before.

Anyway, I’m still looking forward to True Blood returning to HBO at the end of June whether the books suck or not. You can’t even really compare the books to the show at this point, they’re just so different.

For the record, I started writing this post at around 11am. It’s now 3:20pm and I’m finally getting back to it. That’s how busy work has been.

On Saturday night we went to the drive-in and saw Bridesmaids again, as well as The Hangover Part 2 which was absolutely stupid. Bridesmaids was as awesome as the first time we saw it, but The Hangover 2 was just unfunny as fuck which is not surprising since I hated the first one. So why did we watch it? Boredom and the fact that the drive-in played the two movies together.

I took a picture of Blake before the movies started, here it is:

He is texting.

Yesterday was day 1 of no smoking because I broke down Friday night due to stress and bought some. Oddly, Monday was pretty mellow. I just did my work and the day went by without really any cravings at all. I’d say today is about the same but maybe there’s a liiiittle but of crave.

For dinner, I was dying for poutine so we went to the chip truck down the road called “The Saucy Pig” where I got a burger and a large poutine, which I didn’t finish because it wasn’t very good and I never do:

The poutine wasn’t very good because the gravy kinda sucked and the fries were overdone. I was disappoint, particularly since I paid $9.50 for it.

Today I went out in the garden so I could show you my ugly irises. I wish someone reading this lived close enough and wanted the damn things because I think they’re ugly as sin and I hate them but I can’t bring myself to dig them up and just let them die.

See? Ugly.

Daisies.

Funny story about these little blue things.

I had a lot of these plants as of 2 or 3 weeks ago, whenever the End of the World was supposed to be. Since we would be planting seeds in the front garden that weekend, I wanted the kids to weed the garden and for Blake to weedwhack it. Madison said that these blue things, that didn’t even have buds on them, were flowers, and I just assumed she was saying that because there were a lot of them and she didn’t want to weed them, so I said okay, don’t weed them, even though I thought they were weeds. Then Blake didn’t want to weedwhack for some reason and asked if he could mow what was coming up, which I said yes to and he mowed down all of the weeds except for about 10 of these blue flowers that had not even buds on them. And lo & behold, the damn things are flowers. Oops! I guess we know for next year.

My window boxes are doing well!

The window boxes need watering but the sun was right over top of them and I didn’t want to scorch them by watering them with the sun glaring down on them. I figure I’ll wait until sunset and while I do that, I’ll get Madison to water the veggie garden, which we planted last weekend.

Last night my friend Manda posted this video on Facebook about how to give yourself a houndstooth maniucure:

Both Madison and I were enthralled, to the point where I couldn’t sleep last night because I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I got up and ordered the stamping kit and 3 templates: houndstooth, plaid, leopard and a diamond pattern.

I never paint my fingernails because I can’t stand the feeling of them painted, they feel heavy and weird and unnatural, but my toenails are almost always painted and the templates see big enough for big toes. Madison paints her fingernails and was getting upset yesterday that her “nail art” wasn’t going so well, which was the real impetus for me buying this stuff. I’ll keep them when they come and I’ll be in charge of them (so they don’t get lost or ruined in her room) but she’ll be allowed to use them whenever she wants. I’ll even help her if I’m not busy.

I had so much more to write about this morning when I started typing this post. :o/ I guess I’ll just stop this here then. Happy Tuesday?

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Help RAPS win $25,000!

My friend Phaedie loses one of her friends at least once a week. That’s because she works for a high-capacity cat sanctuary in Richmond, British Columbia, run by the Richmond Animal Protection Society, and unfortunately feline leukemia and feline AIDS is a part of the job, especially when dealing with such close quarters.

To keep cats out of shelters, people need to spay and neuter their pets and that’s what RAPS is aiming to do with Pepsi Canada’s Refresh Project contest. Their aim, with the $25,000 to be won, is to help low-income families spay, neuter and vaccinate their pets in order to help curb the already problematic business of sick, unwanted pets.

So how can you help? It’s easy. Click here and vote. You can sign in using Facebook connect so it really does only take 2 clicks and you’d be making a world of difference for animals and their people. Plus you’d be making Phaedie and I incredibly happy.

We need to try and get them to #1 or #2 as only the top 2 spots receive funding. Currently they’re in 3rd place, so we need to make a solid push to get then into 2nd! I know people don’t have money to give to every charity that comes their way, but if you’d normally be clicking on Farmville crops anyway, please use your mouse-fingers for this as well and help make a difference in the world. Thanks.

The contest voting is until June 30th, it’s a daily vote and I’ll be posting every few days to remind you to vote in case you forget.