I’ve spent most of the day painting roses in watercolor: beautiful, impossibly lush roses. It’s a meticulous task, not one to be done in an hour or so. Still, when the watercolors flow into the water and begin to spread, I watch in wonder. Gail squeals.
I have watercolor class and lab on Tuesdays – all day. I spent the day getting a 0.2 ounce brush full of water or paint and applying it to paper. So, why am I exhausted?
In part it’s because I get so absorbed in what I’m doing that I hardly move. After a while my back starts to complain, but it doesn’t stop me.
For a break, I joined the beginners to make a collage with colored tissue paper and laundry starch. The hardest part of that was finding some laundry starch and tearing the tissue paper into bits. The most fun part of that task was tearing colored tissue into odd shapes and slathering on the starch with abandon. There are not that many things one can do these days with complete abandon.
Right now it looks and feels like a kindergarten project, but I have some ideas on how to improve on it.
I hope you had some fun today. I know my husband did. Because I wasn’t home, he spent all day working in his vegetable garden. He puts his seedling under a cloche or bell-shaped plastic cap. That keeps the seedling warm and protects it from the rabbits. We have lots of rabbits. However, something, and I suspect it isn’t the rabbits, is knocking off the cap and eating the seedlings. That doesn’t make him happy. Right now, he is outside planning bigger barricades.
We’ll see how the week goes. I hope your week is going well.
Marilynne
