Sprained Ankle

The triplets departed yesterday around noon, so Nana and I got back to the attic clean-up work order after they left. Got everything cleaned and sorted, got two new shelving units situated, and got everything stowed in its proper place. Then we turned off the light and called it D-U-N-N done! A bunch of tubs still need to go to the storage unit, but that won't be a big deal.

Right after breakfast this morning I stepped out onto Nana's deck. Or rather I fell out onto Nana's deck. Caught the inside edge of my heel on the threshold, turning my foot sideways, leaving all my weight to come down on the topside of my right foot.

I could hear it start a sickening crackle and time slowed waaaay down. Knew I was about to fall....crackle, crackle, crackle...thought, "Hummmm this isn't going to be good"...crackle, crackle, crackle,..."I'm probably about to break my ankle"...crackle, crackle, crackle..."That's gonna hurt." Then time clicked back into normal speed.

BAM!

Hit the deck hard with both hands and one knee. Laid there all sprawled out thinking, "Damn, that wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done."

Assessed my injuries and decided nothing was broken. Hobbled back into the kitchen to clean up the bloody bits. Big gouge in my right palm from a deck nail, a badly skinned knee and a sore shoulder were obvious. Surprisingly I was walking on the crackly ankle without any pain.

Nana washed, disinfected, and bandaged my wounds and I analysed the ankle. It really wasn't the ankle at all (thank goodness) but the tendons across the top of my foot, the tenderest bits were right where it joined the ankle. I was testing the range of mobility and found the exact position where it was injured with a loud yelp.

Nana said I had to wrap, elevate and ice it for several hours.

Sigh.

Settled in with my sketch kit since there was nothing else I could do.


After the shock of injuring myself wore off I got really bored and restless. Decided those tubs upstairs weren't gonna get into storage by themselves, so I hobbled up there and started dragging them down the stairs. Helped Nana load the truck and unload at the storage unit...twice. Two truckloads worth of stuff.

When Poppy came home he examined all my boo-boos and declared I needed X-rays and a tetanus shot. He asked when was my last tetanus shot. Told him I don't think I've ever had a tetanus shot. I only get injured or get sick when I'm at his house.

And yes, my nose is starting to stuff up. The Snotty Sneezer triplet has infected me with some kind of daycareitis crud. Joy.

Monkeytoes - EDM #23 - Draw Your Foot

Journaling:

I have big ol' long monkey toes that I can move independently. It's rather disturbing looking now that I think about it.

I can pick up almost anything off the floor without having to bend over. That's come in very handy as I've gotten older.

I also have impossibly high arches. Never have found a pair of cowboy boots that fit correctly.

Nana told me today that one of the triplets was sitting on the floor and picked up a Froot Loop with her toes and put it in her mouth with her toes.

That monkey toe thing definitely runs in the family.

EDM #10 - Draw Some Hands

These are the hands of my triplet great-nieces who just turned 2-years-old. Their little hands are into everything these days!

Gratuitous triplet pic:

The girls need some little gay minions to help them out with hair and wardrobe, doncha think??? Those dog ears could use some product.

Pencil Portrait, Lady Bowler - WIP

Journaling:

I'm working through yet another how-to-draw book - Lifelike Portraits from Photographs by Lee Hammond. It recommends practicing faces using cover girls from magazines.

LOL! I don't have any women's magazines with cover girls. The closest thing I could find was Hubby's US Bowler.

I got all my chores and errands done by 9:00 am this morning. I was looking forward to a whole day of zen-like drawing since Hubby wasn't due home until 10:00 pm tonight.

I poodle-dewed around and didn't break out the pencils until 4:30 pm, then Hubs showed up early at 5:00. Didn't get back to drawing until 11:30 pm. Got her face finished by 1:00 am, then called it a night.

I think it came out great! It actually looks like the photo! Woot! Still need to do a little bit of tweaking and finish the hair.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, I drew a nose too.
Beware the Cosmic Nose of Death.

Gesture Drawings

Realized last night that the art books from the library were due back on Monday. Had to crack one of them open for the first time today.

The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides was published after his death in 1938. It has been THE how-to-draw book for decades. My three-penny review is that it is more a how-to book on seeing rather than drawing. There are no tips or tricks on drawing per se, but how to think, feel and relate to the subject.

He uses four kinds of drawings:

1) Blind contour - Draw slowly without looking at the paper, *feeling* along the edge of the subject with the pencil as if you are touching the edge of the subject with your finger.

2) Gesture drawing - A scribbly type of drawing to capture the essence of the thing as a whole, not concentrating on any details, just the motion or gesture of the subject.

3) Weighted drawing - Mashing the pencil to the paper to make darker scribbles where the weight of the subject would occur: hips, thighs, the leg with weight on it.

4) Modelled drawing - Mashing the pencil into the paper to make blacker marks where the form of the subject goes away from you and lighter where it comes closer. Similar to a sculptor mashing his thumbs into a clay head to form the sides of the nose.

And that's it. That's all the kind of drawing exercises there are, just in different media: Pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oil.

To use the book properly would take a year of hard work, and that is no exaggeration. There are 64 exercises, each one having five sections, and each section requiring three or more hours of drawing 40 or so drawings. The basic premise seems to be that if you draw three hours a day every day for a year you'll get better. Ya think???

The only part of the book that stuck with me was the gesture drawing. Nicolaides said that in 30 seconds you should have a whole, recognizable form on the paper. Oy. Thought I'd give that concept a shot. So I trotted out on the porch with the big Black N Red to watch Hubby rake the last of the leaves.

Hubby was taking a break on the porch and that was a good thing. It was less daunting to draw him sitting than trying to draw him raking leaves. Usually if I ask to draw him he immediately finds a pressing matter to which he must attend and bolts. He actually agreed to sit absolutely still for a few minutes while I drew.

Sitting 1:
Sitting 2:
Reclining:Hubby said these were OK but they make him look like he has a big ol' belly and moobs. He does have a big ol' belly and moobs.

Hubby got bored with posing and went back to his leaf raking, so I drew the neighbor's car.

Hubby took another break and Cheezburger joined him for a little lap time:
They sat there together for a long while, so I started adding facial features. Shouldn't have done that.

Hubby went back to work, so Cheezy became my sketching victim:

Then Hubby got a phone call....


...and switched the phone to the other ear.


The neighbor came out to chat and inspect:
Believe it or not, the drawing on the right is recognizable as the neighbor. That one gets a Woot! The drawing on the left with the thin lines is where I showed them to her and had to trace the features so she could understand what the scribbles represented. I thought it was obvious but she was having trouble seeing it.

Tried tackling Hubby actually raking leaves:



Hubby finally wore himself out raking and piled up on the porch to cool off. I drew the only part of him I could see as a whole from a distance of two feet, his arms:


I realize these are rough drawings, not really post-worthy, but they are valuable to me because something clicked in my brain about halfway through them. I got it. I got what Nicolaides was attempting to teach his students through repetitive drawing exercises. I have a new way of seeing things as a whole, not just as the sum of their parts. Eureka!

Achala, A Nomadic Herder

Tomorrow is the first "You Can Draw!" class. Required class materials are paper, pencil, and eraser.

Wow! Holy cow, I haven't drawn in pencil in eons...Oct. 21, 2008 to be exact. I discovered my scanner doesn't play nice with graphite and that was the end of that little experiment.

However, since I'm gonna have to draw in pencil, might as well dust one off and have a go at it. Discovered Rick Tulka does all his drawings in pencil, so that gave my soul a little encouragement too. Dug out an old General's drawing set which included an Extra Black layout pencil. Have no idea what a layout pencil is used for, but it was the blackest pencil in the box, so I sharpened it up.

Meh, that didn't melt my butter. There are tips and tricks to drawing an eye and they weren't in my brain at the moment.

Drawing from real life is better than drawing from my brain, but since nobody was up but the cat, a photo would have to suffice. Hello National Geographic.

This is a tiny piece of a much larger portrait of Achala, a nomadic herder in India (photo by Steve McCurry; Nat'l Geo, Feb 2010, p. 107).



Big sigh, got his nose turning left onto Route 66 just after the bridge.

I think when you draw a face, you're supposed to lay out the shape of the head and location of all the major parts. I don't do that obviously. I start at the feature that attracted me to draw, draw that, then draw outward from that point. Art teachers across the nation will gasp in horror at that statement I'm sure.

And my scanner still doesn't play well with graphite. I fiddled with the settings and never could get the blacks to be black. Oh well, visualize blackness in the appropriate places please. Thank you.

Thanksgiving Day at the Farm

Journaling:

Lots of good food and family. Lots to be thankful for. Started the day with pie...ended the day with pie. 5 pies - 10 people - do the math. I'm very thankful for pie.

We came for the pie, we ate the pie, and, thankfully, we did NOT take pie home.

Between supper and seconds the men disappeared throughout the house to take a nap. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, the women gathered in the living room to talk about the men.



Sissy was snuggled in an afghan fighting the Nap Monster. I fetched my sketchbook thinking I would have an oblivious sketch target in a few minutes. Everybody laughed when they realized what I was doing and woke her up, dangit.

She wouldn't let me sketch her whole lovely self, so I had to settle for her legs and her itty bitty feetsies.

Yep, Size 6 is itty bitty. I wear Size 9. There's no fear of me tipping over.

Zombie Repellent

That's good information to have in the event you are attacked by a mob of zombies. It is unknown if the jar has to be open for full effectiveness.

Oh yeah, there's a story behind this. True story. Trust me. Can't post it on the interwebs though.

I have a pretty fertile imagination but I couldn't have come up with this even after ingesting party drugs.

Hand Surgery

1) Cut V-shaped bit of skin and fatty tissue.

2) Turn and flip V-flap over end of exposed bone. Fatty bits give protection and padding to end of bone.

3) Sew long end of flap under fingernail. Pull second section edges together and sew closed, forming a 'Y'.

This was BIL's surgery (as I understand it) to reconstruct his missing fingertip. I chuckled at the part about taking fatty bits as a cushion because BIL has no fatty bits anywhere on his body.

Initial bandages have to stay on for two weeks. Full recovery in ten weeks or so.

The only problem will be trying to keep BIL out of his toolbox for that long. It may kill his soul.

---

Hubby took my granny ride to work today so I had to drive his truck to run errands. I was terrified. It was like driving an 18-wheeler and I felt like I was taking up both lanes.

Momma was not happy.

Right Brain - Left Brain

Days like today I struggle to find my creativity. Real Life keeps giving it a punch in the jaw.

The day started with Hubby saying, "The credit card bills and the electric bill came (Ow!); I think the truck clutch is going out (Ow!); there's no food in the house (Ow!); and I don't have any clean underwear (Ow, Ow, Ow!)."

I replied, "Honey, I think you need to go play golf....all day long."

Day Trip - DeGray Lake

Say What?

Sketchbook 9-12-08

Backstory at "Weekend Doodles"