Tick. Tick …

Ticking over. Making stuff. Drawing. Dreaming. Keeping busy. That’s important. Keeping busy.

Carrying on crocheting. Getting the hang of the hook action but dealing with the ends of the rows is a bit of a nightmare. I’ll get the hang of it in time, I’m sure.

In Vienna, near the Hundertwasser Haus, there was a shop with some very cute ornaments hanging on a piece of beautiful Indian embroidered patchwork.

I’m having a go at the birds …

I’ll paint it when it’s dry.

Then. Teabags and pens.

That’s all.

Beta-Blockers

This morning, I was reflecting on beta-blockers. They were referred to in the book I’m reading at the moment, as having been prescribed to counter feelings of anxiety.

Some years ago, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. I was prescribed some medication designed to lower it. The medication made my ankles swell up and, when I reported this to my GP, he reduced the dose and prescribed beta-blockers to be taken in addition. Previously, I had only heard of beta-blockers as something that snooker players took to help steady their cue hands. The combination of medications was effective in lowering my blood pressure and I thought nothing more of it.

This was around 2015 and I did notice subsequently that I had slowed down a bit. I didn’t seem to have much energy. I’d fall asleep in front of the TV or find myself staring into space in work. I put this down to getting older.

Following a procedure to address some atrial fibrillation I’d been having, another doctor altered my prescription in late 2017, lowering my dose of beta-blockers. Well, my goodness, it was like being poked in the face with a sharp stick and I haven’t looked back. The fog of indolence lifted and I felt as if I had twice the energy that I had before. And so it is to this day and hopefully for the foreseeable future.

There ARE downsides. Too much thinking, sometimes obsessively. Not enough sleep. Some anxiety and hyperactivity. Occasional frustration and impatience. Stressing over unimportant issues. Throwing things and shouting (but not at other people, I hasten to add). Putting the energy to good use by, for example, engaging in creative stuff, helps to counteract some of these, however. I rarely achieve calm though, unless I become absorbed in an alternative activity. That can get a bit wearing, to be honest, and occasionally I crash.

That’s got nothing to do with the stuff I’ve been doing in the last few days. I just wanted to get those thoughts out of me and on to a page.

I saw this on Instagram and decided to have a go. I drew a heart shape, some leaves and flower shapes, cut them out with a sharp knife and laid them on top of a contrasting background. Quite a nice effect and easy enough to do.

In the last post, I mentioned that I had made a bags of a macrame bracelet. So I made another one. I kept away from the superglue this time and so the slip knot slips in the correct manner.

I haven’t done any wood carving for ages. One of the reasons is that I’m not very good at sharpening tools and some of them are a bit blunt. The guy who runs the firm I bought my carving axe from, Robin Wood (yes, I know!), suggested making sanding/sharpening blocks out of wood and very fine gauge sandpaper. I bought the sandpaper in Halfords ages ago, but I only got around to buying the wood to make the blocks with on Friday. So I made the sanding blocks today. Here’s the process …

Yesterday I popped into Evans art supply shop and bought a few tubes of Holbein Acryla Gouache. Just black and white. One of the properties of gouache is that, once dry, it can be reactivated very easily by water or other paint. One consequence of this is that if you paint a light colour on a dark background, the paint can mix and become muddy. Acryla gouache doesn’t reactivate.

Finally, on holiday, I started doing some sketches in a journal I keep to record the arty stuff I been doing. You’ll have noticed the lined paper on which some recent paintings have been done. I like doing this. Much of the art I’ve done over the last year is scattered randomly in my attic so doing them in the journal keeps everything in order and means I can track my progress, in painting anyway. Also, it makes the journal more interesting to review.

Here’s today’s page, with the writing ‘artfully’ blurred.

This morning, as well as thinking about beta blockers, I thought, pretty randomly, about the chef Ken Hom and wondered what had become of him. In the gym later, I happened to glance at one of the few remaining TVs and, what do you know, there he was, cooking stuff. I wrote about co-incidences recently and paying attention to them. There was the weirdest string of them at the start of last week. Too complicated to explain but ultimately, positive.

I’m off to adjust my chakras.

Tetley Tea Folk

A painting on a round teabag popped up in my Instagram feed recently. It was really well done: a dark background with a boat seen from above. Actually, I mentioned it before. It was the inspiration for my rowing boat painting a few posts back.

Google eventually told me that Tetley put their tea in round bags and so I started trying to find Tetley teabags in supermarkets. Tesco didn’t have them but we were walking past Dunnes in town last weekend and Christine suggested having a look in there. And what do you know? There they were. Special offer too. So now I have 160 of them.

I soaked a few, dried them out, emptied them, painted them black and came up with these, as a start. Both a little rushed but you get the idea.

Otherwise I’ve been sketching in snatched moments. There’s this …

And Newgrange …

And an androgynous imaginary friend … (people and faces are not a strength of mine – I gave up on his/her nose after five attempts.)

And last night, before I took Edward out in Christine’s car to practice his driving, I made a really lovely thin black macrame bracelet. I used superglue to fix the locking slip knot. Unfortunately I used too much and it no longer slips. Annoying but I won’t make that mistake again.

Here’s something a little more successful macrame-wise.

Almost forgot. I was messing around with lettering too …

That’s about it for now.

Needs Must

Maybe it’s the time of year (not my favourite, as I’ve explained previously). Or maybe it’s just circumstances. Maybe both. My mind has been buzzing over the last week. Not always in a productive way.

Sometimes art for me is pure therapy. Yesterday, I found some solace in mandalas and doodles: short periods of concentration on patterns and repetition that slowed my thoughts down and gave my head a break. It’s my form of meditation. It doesn’t last long, but it’s like taking my foot off the accelerator for a short period to stop the engine over-heating.

Doodling, Distractedly

It’s that ‘back to school’ time of year, when people take a deep breath, gird their loins and get ready for the return to term time routine. It’s not my favourite time of year, to be honest. I love the relative freedom of summer, the absence of deadline pressure, the freedom to imagine, daydream, doodle mentally, be a bit late for things.

As a school-goer, I always dreaded the first day back. I don’t know what I was anxious about. Maybe just the unknown and new: timetables, teachers, classrooms. Maybe my peers: would my school friends still be friendly towards me? I’m really not sure. I just remember the tension and the fluttering in my stomach.

This is going to be a busy week, with two very important meetings and a load of other new term stuff to sort out. I’m glad about that because I need the distraction.

I doodled yesterday, mentally and creatively.

Here’s an overworked strawberry in gouache.

And a knotted/macrame dragonfly.

Here are some doodle doodles that I did when thinking about something else.

And then I botched a good idea about bamboo in the moonlight. I’m not even going to put it up here because it ended up an embarrassing mess. Well, OK, here it is. (I did say to myself that I’d put up the bad and the OK.) The bamboo element wasn’t working so I changed it as I was going along and then I wasn’t sure what it was. It was six trees, then three, then five. Ugh.

Phew.

Tribal 2

I’m rather taken with some of the tribal symbols, motifs and drawings that I’ve found on Pinterest. I like their primitive vibe. So I did a few of them this evening. Some elements are just copies but I adapted and messed around with others …

They’re on used teabags, painted with gouache, which has the right sort of matt quality to make them quite effective. They’re fun to do too.

Here’s that preacher on a pebble, with a few more embellishments …

I varnished the pebble later but the contrast was lost so it’s hard to make out the detail.

Then I did this from Rice’s Architectural Primer, keeping up my sequence of one a day from that book.

It’s a bit messy but I don’t mind that. I layered the watercolour from light to dark. You can see the layers on on the right hand side. I then used a fine liner to emphasise the detail. I’m quite pleased with the texture of the stone. I felt this was going to be a hard one, and it was. In the past I would have approached this with some trepidation which tends to make one’s lines quite tentative. This evening, however, I felt reasonably confident that I could have a good go at this, and so I just went for it.

Received this today and I’m going to have a go at it …

… later in the summer. My sewing experience to date comprises sewing buttons on shirts, sewing up a sweater that I machine knitted years ago, narrowing a pair of chefs trousers for college wear and making some net curtains. Still, nothing ventured …

I did a few other bits and pieces this evening but, as yet, they are works in progress.

Arsenal

Just received a package from Amazon. Literally 20 minutes ago. Another weapon in my aforementioned. Drawing gum.

So, the idea is that you use the drawing gum to create a mask. You’ll see what I mean in the illustration below.

In this, I drew the branch with leaves with the drawing gum directly onto the black card. I let it dry (well, with the help of a hairdryer: I’m not a patient man). Then I painted the entire card with diluted white gouache. Hairdryer again. Finally, I rubbed off the masking gum with a normal eraser.

Click to enlarge

Excited!