It's been months, I know. I've really missed creating artwork. And now that the school year is over, I feel like I can breathe. It has been a challenging four months. Wait, it was only four months since I started teaching again? Wow, it seems longer. What started as a temporary job as a substitute for a teacher having surgery, it turned into a permanent teaching job! It was challenging because I had to juggle three classes that I was subbing and the three classes that I was actually teaching. Enough. Let's get back to art, sort of..
I created the piece you see above this morning. It felt good to draw and paint, though I'm clearly rusty. It's going to take more practice before I my confidence back to create. I feel like I've lost my mojo. And that's why I started with a quote and a Jane Davenport-style girl. I drew her with my favorite Platinum Carbon Pen and used Shinhan watercolors to paint. The writing was done with Posca white paint pen and a bit of shadowing done with Prismacolor colored pencil. Her face is a bit wonky but it's a start. And I love the quote. So much of what limits us is in our minds. We create so many imaginary obstacles that prevents us from trying - I can't draw, I'm not creative, I can't do math. And I'm usually good about not letting those obstacles get in my way. I just need to start creating daily again, even if it's just random doodling.
Here are a few pages I've done since the last post. My birthday was May 1 and one of my students made a cake! It was a beautiful strawberry layer cake and it was delicious! She was thrilled that I drew her.
And for Mother's Day, I got a french press! Good bye, Keurig.. I love how the richness of the coffee flavor comes through with the press. And it is a bit more work cleaning it, it's definitely worth it!
My youngest got to attend a mock 1942 White House State Dinner as part of the 7th grade social studies program. Remember, she's the one who also participated in the re-enactment of the
Battle of Gettysburg. Her social studies teacher is just wonderful. And on the right, you see a picture of the Bitmoji portrait of my IB SL students. If you don't know about Bitmoji, it is an app that creates an avatar of yourself and I had each student create his/her avatar and send it to me and I created the class picture. I even had a poster made for my classroom and I got each one to sign it!
I drew this one during work. LOL. My second year students were taking the IB exams so on this day, I didn't have to teach at all but had to cover classes for other teachers and ended up not having time for lunch. But of course, I made time for art. Priorities...
And now, an update on planner. As you recall, I started to use the
Bullet Journal system to plan because it wasn't enough to put things on my phone. I am not naturally organized so I have to force myself to be so I can get things done and oh yes, not forget to pick up your child from cheer practice. I was using a dotted (has dots in grids) Moleskine journal for my BuJo and when I starated teaching, I used a gridded composition book. But then I found a journal with dotted Tomoe River papaer (I use journals with tomoe river paper for my art) from
Nanami Paper. Unfortunately, it was sold out and not available until end of June. And so I searched for others like it and found an
Etsy shop that sells them and I bought the last one. So this will be my new BuJo.. Yay! By the way, I used Microsoft Sway to create the slideshow. As a side note, I've been using Microsoft products, especiall OneNote to teach and I've come to really appreciate the suite of software that comes with Office.
