The summer is mine!

My son's party was yesterday and the summer is mine now! Well mostly anyway. We have a TON of food leftover so I'm happy to say I will not be cooking this week! It's good food too, if I do say so myself.

Today I will probably be taking the day off from life in general. I am absolutely exhausted. The latter part of last week was extremely busy and hectic as well as emotionally draining for one reason or another. I woke up fairly early today and I feel like I've been run over and then dragged by a truck... no joke! Fibromyalgia, stress/tension, party planning, and lots of heavy lifting are not a good combination. So as much rest and relaxation as I can get are on the agenda for today. If any art can be done from my comfy recliner, then maybe a little of that too. After a day or two of recuperating, life can get back to some kind of normal here and I can try and get caught up on my art workshops.

And here's a 'just because'... Some of my goofy kids and their 'duckface' pose. I hate this stupid pose you see so many on facebook doing in their pictures!! They made me take it!

Catching up

I've been busy the last couple days again but not so much that I couldn't get a few artsy things accomplished. I played around with a couple faces yesterday. They aren't all that great because I was just quickly sketching on some excess book pages I have from altering a book for Christy's Eclectic Altered Journal class. But at least I'm somewhat caught back up with 29 Faces with face numbers 15 and 16.

I also doodled some flowers and played with my new Prismacolor markers on the book pages. I have a lot to learn with the markers yet. I only have a set of 24 but it's plenty to play with. I really like them so far. I played around with some of my sprays and stencils yesterday too with those book pages. I have SO many book pages I have a lot to mess around with. I will use these in my Eclectic Altered Art Journals... or somewhere.

One more thing I've played with is finishing the couple bound journals I made for my youngest daughter. She keeps a journal now that she's a freshman in college. Just a writing journal. She's not so much into the art thing at this point. But I made a couple coptic bound journals for her with plain copy paper and they turned out awesome. I recycled some boxes for the hard covers and used a roll of white paper I have here for the little ones to play with to cover those with and then used markers to doodle the cover. The second one I left plain for her to decorate herself. I am so tickled with how they turned out and want to make some for myself as well.

I'm not sure what it is about binding my own books that I love so much but I adore the process. I could easily just keep making them and end out with way more books than I'll ever get through so I guess I have to find more people to make them for!

The next thing I need to catch myself up with is Rhomany's Portraits class and the latest Art Geeks prompt. I've fallen behind again. I think that catches the blog up for now. I should be able to get some play time this weekend to do some more before next weekend's big graduation craziness. My baby is graduating. The last one! I can hardly believe it.

Face #10

My son is out with friends this morning so I had some time to eek out a quick face sketch which will be my number 10 face for the 29 Faces challenge. I used another magazine photo as a reference for this one. I'm finding that quite fun. I may play around with some shading for it later when I have some time but for now it's at least a face I can count.

Prom preparations will commence real soon and I will post some pictures of the boy in his crazy outfit. Grand March should be interesting!

Update:

I decided to go ahead and do a little shading right now while I still had a little time. Boys sure are different than girls when it comes to prom! With the girls it was an all day project getting ready to go. My son isn't even home and isn't coming home until it's time to get ready and get out the door for pictures. After five of them... I think I'm finally glad that this will be the last one. This mom is tired! 

A little further...

I've taken my Drew Barrymore sketch a little further. I fixed the right side of her face that looked a little wonky and I fixed the right side of her head that looked like she had a big ol' tumor growing there. We haven't gone that far in the class yet but I went ahead and did some shading on the face according to the photograph. I don't know that my girl really looks much like Drew Barrymore but I'm not hating it as a drawing. Her hair leaves a lot to be desired. I am looking forward to that part of the class so I can get something that looks better. I know I still have a lot of work to do to get better but I don't feel it's too shabby for never having drawn anything until January of this year. I did a little bit in junior high school but I hadn't since then... and never people.

Unfortunately I am not going to have a lot of time to play around with my drawings this weekend. Well not until Sunday anyway. My youngest son's senior prom is Saturday. We just picked up his tux. The boy has a sense of humor, that's for sure. The tux he is wearing did not come from a tuxedo shop. It came from a costume shop. It is the powder blue tux with tails and ruffles from the movie Dumb and Dumber. He's wearing his high top Converse sneakers with it and carrying a cane. It's actually the tux he wore a couple years ago in the high school's production of Grease. He was Eugene (the nerd) and he wore it in the big dance scene.So yeah... tomorrow will be interesting to say the least!

So much for being ahead!

I haven't drawn a face since the weekend! I was two or three faces ahead in the beginning and now I'm two behind if I don't get any done today. But I WILL get them done. If not today then definitely tomorrow.

It's been a crazy busy last few days. My youngest is graduating in a few weeks and had his very last "May Fiesta" choir concert this weekend. It's a big deal in our town and they always hold a special little ceremony for the senior choir members. Yes, I cried. He's my baby!

Then Monday I had my sick grandson while his mommy and daddy worked. He was really clingy so he pretty much set up camp on my lap the whole afternoon. Needless to say this did not create much time for drawing/painting.Today I had to grocery shop and then my youngest daughter came to spend the afternoon with me... a kind of last minute thing. She is a summer RA in her college dorm so isn't coming home for the summer. It's just a couple blocks away though. But she has so many jobs and duties there that I hardly ever get to see her and she had a day off and wanted to use my craft supplies for a project. LOL  And now that same grandbaby is here for the evening while his parents are at a baseball game. So definitely not much time for art. I'm thinking tomorrow I am putting on comfy clothes and not leaving the house all day so I can play at my art desk.

One thing I did do while my daughter was here was work on a hand-bound journal that I'm making for her. Just regular paper, coptic bound for her to write in. I got all the signatures sewn together. I just need to put a hard cover on it for her and she wants me to decorate it somehow. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE to bind my own journals??

No art today

Not much in the way of art to post about today. Got up WAY too early for a Saturday and ended out laying back down for a while later in the morning and when I got back up I ended up watching Creative Adventures on Linqto for several hours, learning all kinds of new things until I just couldn't avoid it any longer and needed to put "real" clothes on instead of the sweats I schlepped around in all day.

My youngest... my little baby... is a senior this year and like all my older kids, has been very involved in the award winning high school choir here. Tonight is his very last May Fiesta... a BIG choir concert our high school has every year. It's always especially big for the seniors because they do a big senior slide show at the end for all the choir seniors. I've been going to these and going to these over the years and this will be my last one! And I'm not even going to try and pretend like I'm not gonna cry. It'll happen!

So it's a good thing that I got myself ahead on my 29 Faces this week because by tomorrow I will no longer be ahead anymore! Tomorrow there will be art time though come hell or high water!