MYM

It's been almost two weeks since this blog has seen any action from me... Lots of comments though, thank you so much :D

I've been a little - okay, a lot! - busy with Pikaland's Making Your Mark e-course. It's a course that promises to help you find or investigate your personal style in various ways, and so far that's true. There is a new assignment every week, and there is plenty of room to stretch yourself, if you choose to. It's interesting! Last week I had to create an image from a combination of one item on a list of things I KNOW and one item off a list of things I LOVE, and then recreate that image in both pen & ink and collage! It was a total challenge, especially to get it all finished within a week ;) But I did, and I love the way it coaxed me out of my comfort zone - especially the black and white image that was supposed to include tones and values. Man, tones and values are hard! I knew that, I've only just begun trying to add more light and shadows to my watercolour pieces, but then to decide whether red is lighter than blue, and how to represent that in ink lines? Hard!

Here is what I did in my 'medium of choice'. My 'items' were "I LOVE going outside with my kid on his balance bike - he's given me new eyes and a new lease on wonder", and "I KNOW my kid is half South-African". The elephant was annoying - I miscoloured it, then re-coloured it, which didn't work as well as I'd hoped, and then I tried to rescue the whole blessed overworked thing with coloured pencils. Let's just say he's got a skin condition and be done with it ;) And let's say I'm able to draw an elephant that looks like an elephant, because in the end, that impressed me most :D As well as how I drew my kid :D Sure, there is something not quite right with his hairline, but hey - we all need areas of practise, right?! ;)

This week's assignment will be fun too, I think and hope! We were meant to go to a museum or art gallery, and revisit an existing work of art. And while that sounds like fun (can't remember the last time I went to a museum - shame on me!), I don't really see when I could be doing that and finish some art work before Monday. And then I remembered (funny how these things work, really!) that there is a whole ado around here about a couple of months that Claude Monet spent in Zaandam back in 1871! I investigated and found out there is a little book about it, so I went out and got that - and there are quite a couple of surprises there :D But I won't spoil the fun just yet - I'll post about that when I'm able to illustrate my findings ;)

Yes, I'm enjoying MYM, for sure! I love a good challenge! I am a little disappointed in the lacking sense of community there though. After both assignments, I've been going out of my way to find something constructive to say about each and every piece of art work posted - because I feel that's part of the deal, and because I enjoy seeing what others come up with, for inspiration and at times awe, but hardly anyone bothers to come back and do the same. Apart from Koosje & Jodi - much appreciated :) Of course that is what it is, but in the end, I feel I've paid a lot of money for just a challenge and some feedback from the course's creators - who don't come back for a bit of dialogue either. But it is what it is. All that said and paid for, I will enjoy the challenge, and see what I can get out of Monet in Zaandam. Because honestly? I probably never would have investigated what the ado was about if it wasn't for MYM :)

Are you straying outside your comfort zone in any way? I'd love to hear and see!!

Day 26

It's my birthday today, & I'm not keeping my age a secret ;) I'm not ashamed ;)

I am proud of who I have become over the years. That's not something I say lightly, not something I say easily, but it needed to be said. It's been one hell of a trip so far, but I think I'm getting closer to being who my inner 3-yr-old wanted to be when she grew up :)

This past year, including our move (in fact, the actual moving started on my BD last year!), has been the best year in a really long time :)

Today, I'm grateful for my beautiful 'old' friends, and for the lovely & amazing new friends I've met since I turned 37 :) I'm grateful for the fact that I finally feel like I've got something to offer and to share. I'm grateful that those who knew me 'when', stuck with me through a whole lot of anguish and crap.

Here's to friendship. I feel a lot stronger for knowing my friends, for finally living geographically closer to them. I always knew it would be beautiful - & I've felt SO incredibly alone without, living away from the people I knew, hardly knowing my neighbours for the previous 11 years! This is the first year I'm actually feeling in my bones what it means to have friends! I'll be celebrating you with food today, people, lots of food & cake :D

boring

I've been drawing & painting like mad over the past few days. I'd love to show and tell, but there's a lot of angst and negativity involved and I feel like I've been overstating that side of me, lately... These are times of transition, of growth and growing pains for me. I'm channelling lots of stuff into my art journal in stead of into words, and that's a huge step up. I'm slowly letting go of the idea that - if I can word things, I can grasp and control them. So I'm drawing them. It feels good, and I'm getting drawing practise in at the same time :)

But while dealing with things - or: look, pick apart, disect and study the remains - is a big part of who I've always been, life definitely isn't all bad. There's just not enough time in a day to draw all that and sweet smelling roses!

So for the sake of something completely different, I'm sharing our smallest room with you today :)

I'm trying to make it a happier place, seeing that we spend so many hours there, in a lifetime. The (ceramic) houses and cars are the latest addition, I stuck them up with double sided tape just this morning. We brought them home from South Africa, as an odd souvenir :)

My awesome neighbour and friend Tamar says Dutch toilets are the cleanest, but also the most boring in the world. She ought to know, she's a self-proclaimed, well-travelled expert on the subject ;)*
I started decorating toilets long before I met her, and it's a work in progress, but I'm bent on proving her wrong, anyway :)

*she said so in this awesome bit of stand-up comedy (sadly only for the Dutch speakers among you!):

tourists

Chinese tourists, mostly. People 'seeing Europe in 14 days'. They're off to do this:

Plastic culture! It's forgivable in tourists. It really is. Most of us have substituted the Real Thing for instant culture, somewhere - I know I have, anyway. But is it okay for locals?! I'm not so sure. Yet where we are now, we're a 20-minute bike ride away from this place (click). And all those typical Zaans-green gables? That's the colour of my roots... (although I prefer looking at those little bits of heritage 'in the wild', so to speak; find the gems right next to an industrial monstrosity for example. But I know you can't 'do Europe in a fortnight' and have time for a treasure hunt like that. I get that!) I was born around here, and got my first flashes of people and the world in these parts. I never thought it mattered, but I'm slowly finding out it does.

So. I don't have an excuse. It was a gut-inspired moment of... 'I have to'. Squirt in all his glory, intimately acquainting himself with wooden shoes. Slightly too big. You would have, too. Admit it!

spoiled part I

Last week, I got a basket full of grape hyacinths from the neighbour across the road, to welcome us to our new home. I love these flowers; their colour - that can't come as a surprise ;) - and the delicate white ruffle around the edge of the bell-shaped flowers!

And then this week, a friend brought yellow tulips! Sunshine!

Both are still blooming and pretty, and they've already inspired art-ish-tics (see my 2 previous posts)!

All I can wish for now, is that they speed spring along outside as well.

flower

Crappy scan, but some early morning happy art time none the less :)

incongruous

Another sketch for Sketchbook Delight, practising lines and shading. I've got a long way to go on the shading-thing... I just don't see it! I've got a feeling that it's one of those things: once you see it, you pretty much see it. Well, that's what I hope, anyway :)

This is the huge, almost antique dresser Man sort of inherited. As in, someone else in the family inherited it & didn't want it anymore (after having lugged it from South Africa, via England to this here corner), so he scooped ladles of sentiment and second hand-memories all over it, and sort of threatened us into taking it.

It was fine in the old house. It resided in the darkened kitchen and sort of looked good there. If you saw it at all. But in this here house? There are no dark corners! Also, there was no way we could ever manoeuvre it up the stairs in the general direction of the attic. And Man couldn't part with it, because those second-hand memories were also his mother's. And you know what they say about men and their mothers...

But I did put my foot down about the state of the thing. If the only place for it was going to be slap-bang in the middle of the living room of our new and actually colour-schemed home, it was going to be cleaned, stripped and revarnished. Man agreed, and an arm, a leg and a couple of other assorted limbs later, the monstrosity is... uhm... back. And I have to get used to the - sheer hugeness of it, all over again. Also, it sticks out like a sore thumb among our I-need-a-set-of-drawers-oh-let's-go-to-IKEA furniture. Some might say that's a good thing, but I'm not sure.

None of that is of any consequence, though, really. Because It's back, and It's staying. So I'd better do my darndest to grow and love the Thing, dammit! So I drew it and tried. I really did. But I'm not there yet. Not quite...

looking

How gorgeous is this?! And it's pretty much at the end of our street! Sketchbook Delight is inspiring me to look around, and to look up, too. I took my camera along on the walk to the grocery store, and there is plenty to see! See, this is why I wanted to come back to old land again. Well, it's one of the reasons. But through the mayhem of the last months, I forgot. And I forgot to really look, too.

But: how awesome!

new

Hmm. No. I haven't quite settled in yet. It's hard. A lot harder than I'd hoped. And most of it is - as usual - in my head. Which makes it easier, while at the same time it doesn't.
You know how they say 'wherever you go, you bring yourself along'? I actually feel like I've left a bit of myself behind! The bit that's been lighter, this year...
I'm still going with the stern belief that I didn't leave my ability to bounce back behind. Because I checked and checked again. It's here somewhere, lying misplaced, waiting for me to find it in an unlikely corner. I know it is.

Digging it out, along with some much-needed reflection on the Beauty and the Not-Quite that's been 2010 should keep me busy till the hangover subsides ;)
Yesterday was a good day, today was alright. Tomorrow will be better, and next year will rock!

Wishing you a bit of quiet to say goodbye to what needs shedding and a lot of whatever it is you need to welcome 2011! Have the most amazing, awesome-est New Year; see you there!

settling

Getting there. Getting here, to this new house. Trying to feel at home. It takes whiles longer than I expected. But my expectations were a tad on the optimistic side of things...

Now that we're done as far as we're going to be done with it all this here year, I'm going to try and get back into my creative groove again. Which is also taking whiles longer than I had hoped. I've been feeling rather drained over the past, hmm, month or so.

I have no idea whether anyone is still checking this space, but if so - hi!! Thanks for sticking it out! Here are some pictures of the living room to tie you over till I get back - again ;)

paint

basically

Basically?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrghhhhhh!!!

Moving is hard work. I think everything will be alright. I think the new place will be beautiful when it's finished. I do.

But right now?! It's a shambles. And a roof tile blew off in last Friday's storm. We have water damage, probably - hopefully! - because of it. And for the first time in my life, I can't just call the central number to get it fixed.

So basically? I think it'll all be cool. Soon. But for now? If I weren't so busy getting wall paper stuck to walls, and assorted other stuff, I think I'd be sitting on the floor with my fingers in my ears. Rocking to and fro. Singing lalalalaLALALAAAAA! Obviously, that never helped anyone, but it sure feels good, at times ;)

Do you want to share the last time you really wanted to sit down & sing to shut out the world? Or is everything smooth sailing in your corner? Hope so!

crossroads

ahead

That's the change-of-address card I designed, stuck to a journal page that was so out of my comfort zone, it kept me from doing anything creative for days! Until I decided it would do nicely as a background :)

'Ontpolderen' basically translates to 'depoldering'. For the purpose of the card, it means 'getting out of the polder'. Although it also means, colloquially, to stop endless debating. And to flood previously poldered land - but that's just coincidence ;) It's a fine polder, it really is; even when pretty much everyone who doesn't live here thinks otherwise. It's been a good place to live for the past 11 years. So much has happened here... Lots I've dwelt upon over the past months, and lots I'll be dealing with when we're gone and relative quiet surrounds us again.

We're going back to 'old land'. Get our feet dry. The green gables are typical of the place we're moving to. Quite coincidentally, it's the same municipality I was born in and where I spent the first 13 years of my life! It sort of, a little bit, feels like going back to my roots. I hope it'll prove to be a good choice in the end. Scary stuff. All of it!

We got the keys and signed our lives away last Monday, and we'll seriously start working on the place next week. Busy times ahead! I might pop up here in between, I'm not quite sure how everything will fall into place. I'm just sure that it will, fall into place, and that I'll come up the other side. To breathe!

photo challenge: HAPPY

I thought I'd kept the challenge simple. Photograph what makes you happy. Even amidst chaos & mayhem, there are things that make you happy, right? Or, there should be, to keep you grounded. The important thing is, you should never stop looking for things that make you happy, especially while in the jaws of disorder and dust bunnies, both actual and in the form of dislodged bits of settled life.

And I do actually still see the happy! I would be lying on the floor in one big blubbering heap by now if I didn't. Honestly, yes, I am that dramatic in the face of Big Change. But Squirt keeps me firmly planted in the Now, most of the time. I like to think I'm more realistic and practical these days, since becoming a mamma almost 2 years ago. But still. All I ended up with was a photo of a pizza cooked from frozen (with added banana and jalapenos), after a hard day of sorting, discarding, packing, cleaning...

& a bowl of fresh home-made pesto. So apparently, as far as visible records go, my happiness is in food these days! But it isn't, not really. Although it helps, food. Especially the not quite responsible, greasy kind. My happiness is - as always, really - in the small gestures, the funny remarks, the Big Hugs I get at times. The stuff that doesn't photograph well at all. So I emailed Mridula, and told her I was out of the challenge till the move - The Move - is complete, somewhere near the end of November hopefully.

But my creativity isn't locked completely - granted, it's a tangled heap at times, these days, but it's definitely part of what's keeping me sane(-ish, some might argue)!

And also, I think there is nothing wrong with responding to a challenge saying; 'well, there it is. This is the best I can come up with right now.' So, I'm not out! I'm still in! I can't promise to meet exact deadlines at the moment, but I'll be there with what came up, whatever it is, to publish when I can!

Please look at Mridula's post to see how she interpreted the assignment! She came up with the next challenge, SHADOWS, and the deadline is the 8th of November. I'm going to try to make it there :)

blauwbador

it's a bluebador with yellow dots who poops in the wheelie bin, of course

Brain still mushy. Not expecting a change there before the Move is complete... Somewhere in the middle or near the end of November. Soon-ish, so, but it all feels like trying to look through a dirty window by banging your head against it repeatedly. Yeah. Don't ask.

Thank the stars for Carla Sonheim whose silliness has saved me from actual screaming and the tearing out of hairs. Until now at least, because the course is done and that's it. I have to come up with my own stuff again...

But I did! Already! Well, sort of, anyway :) Squirt is inventing words, these days, and this morning's random blurt was 'blauwbador'. In a true enough dialogue, we decided it had yellow dots and lived in the wheelie bin. Or at least, pooped there. Of course ;) You're never too young for those kind of jokes ;) And I could just see it, a friendly monster in the bin.

So I had to draw it. And here it is. Make of it what you will ;) I'm sure there are a lot of things you could come up with. If you're in any way drawn to the Freudian side of things, I'm sure you'll worry about me. But don't! I'm actually quite happy this came out when I least expected it!

photo challenge: NUMBERS

The latest assignment in the photo challenge Mridula & I set up a while ago - numbers...
It was another tough one, but that might be just me. There are numbers around, plenty of them, but I have this silly notion numbers need to mean something. So while it's always fun to scout for photo opportunities, I wasn't easily satisfied with what I came up with. Most numbers in the collage above might make sense to their owners of sorts - though still not to me - but the number 75 on Squirt's top means nothing! He wasn't born in 1975, nor were me or Man, and he, nor us, nor his grandparents are yet 75. We don't live at number 75 and I can't think of any other way this number will soon make sense to any one of us. That's what I mean, it's wrong. Which is why this top is already on its way to the second hand shop (we're about to move and it's clear-out time, by way of an excuse, and anyway - it was a very cheap 'needs must'-buy of the diaper-wearing-related kind, but that's all by the by)!

So I kept looking for numbers to speak to me, and then I saw this! A car of sorts, one of Squirt's favourites! He calls it 'red weird car'. He also has a yellow version, so that clears that up ;) But the number! It's 32! We'll be living at number 32 in the new house!

But that was all I could come up with, as far as physical numbers are concerned. Like I said, me and my odd notions (yes, I count steps at times, too!)... It doesn't make life easier, at least not all the time :)

But then I saw how Squirt liked walking around in my shoes :) And I decided that, like with SPARKLE, I could take it out of the literal and into the illustrative of sorts! He had fun here, I promise - no little kid got hurt in the taking of these pictures ;) - and I got ample opportunity to take as many shots as I wanted!

The caption would read: Size is but a number. Sometimes, numbers matter. Does this count?

Please pop over to Mridula's to see what she came up with!

I know it's my turn to come up with a new assignment, but I haven't. Not yet. Sorry! Brain mush... I'm going to take today to come up with something and add it as an edit to this post tonight. The deadline will be Monday 25th October, and you're very welcome to join if you want to!

Edit, three days later...
I didn't forget and I didn't flake out as such. I have been racking my brain to come up with a new theme, and it's just not happening! So frustrating!!
So I've decided to keep things relatively simple: this round, photograph what makes you happy. Either constantly and long term, or something fleeting like a ray of sun - as long as it makes you feel good :)

scary

That is not our car. & it won't be, any time soon ;)
And this is a bad photo, plucked off the internet.
But provided all the paperwork clears, this will be our house come November! & hopefully a home soon after that!

We will finally be all grown up, mortgaged to the hilt...
Oh my... Oh my!