Monday-8:30am

I was up early enough a couple mornings to see the sun rise... 

...in the hazy sky. 

Karma and I...

...have been... 

...lazy bums all weekend. 

Didn't realize how tired I was after that huge project.  Slept nine hours one night and ten hours another night.  Been beautiful, open-window weather.  The only thing extra I did was to work on the Ink Drop art for September.  I wasn't happy with it in oh so many ways.  Almost didn't enter it because one: everything seemed to go wrong, and two: I tried to repair it with some white acrylic paint and I wasn't sure if that disqualified me (using something other than the five Ink Drop inks).  

Yesterday was the last day to enter and I just decided to send it off--explaining about the white acrylic and asking if it would still qualify.  Rachel said it qualified.  

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I have dropped inks on to wet paper (remember the bookmarks?), but I have never tried to actually paint with inks.  I masked out the daisies...which looked too clumped together later because I made the vase too large for them.  The ink didn't pounce for shrubbery quite like my watercolors, but I used three colors and found out I could blend the ink colors a bit for darkness.  The twigs were too large.  I went to remove the masking and discovered that ink doesn't dry quite as fast as watercolors (and it's hard to tell because it can remain shiny when dry) so I ended up with smeared green smudges instead of white daisy petals--well, you can tell which ones.  

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Okay.  I let it dry longer and then removed the rest of the masked daisy petals.  Which left me with green smudged daisies and white daisies.  *sigh*  So I got out the white acrylic paint and tried to paint in all the daisies...but I discovered that the dry green ink just dissolved into the white paint...even all around the edges of the flower petals that were white to begin with..but once I started I had to finish and paint them all.  Nothing was going right at all.  Not that I have all that much painting experience in the first place.  And I just realized this morning that I should have at least tried to make a shadow for the vase--LOL!

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Moral of the story...don't try something brand new when you are overtired.  I should have experimented with the ink BEFORE I started on the picture so I would have had a better idea what it would and wouldn't do--and I think I would have done a better job with a pencil sketch--LOL!  If I wasn't so tired I might have had another go at it and possibly have done a more presentable job the second time.  Oh well.  

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At least I learned a few things.  I needed a lot less ink than I thought.  Ink can be watered way down (the bottom and the top of the background are the same color ink).  The inks can be blended...to a degree...carefully...don't need much for that, either.  They cleaned up nicely from the brushes--although I used my crummy children's brushes just in case (which also gave me less control painting).  I'm still not sure if I would use my good brushes with ink, but I am now tempted.  So, it was a different experience painting with inks and I learned some things for future reference.

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Meanwhile, we have had a fly infestation.  Small flies with black speckled wings that I have never seen before.  These warm days there would be about a couple dozen of them every morning out there flying against the screen.  Since I've had the porch door open, they've also been inside crawling all over the window screens flitting their wings.  They have mostly stayed on the screens--are delicate, dumb and easy to swat or catch with a tissue.

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I felt badly.  These are not those regular, flyswatter-savvy, intelligent, big houseflies that are a challenging competitor.  These poor tiny things all hovered on the screens longing for the open air, not wanting to be inside here at all.  I don't know how they were getting in or what kind of alien little flies they were, but it was like catching fish in a barrel.  They never had a chance.  But I sure didn't want a houseful of them.  The murderer in me emerged and took care of the problem.

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Blogger has been messing with my reader list again.  Sometimes people's posts haven't been showing up or show up so much after the fact (days later) that I miss them.  Occasionally I open up my dashboard and it says I am not following any blogs at all!  I had to refresh four times one day to get them to show up!  Just so you know if you expected to hear from me...I may have not even seen your blog post.  I like to think most of them are coming through, but who knows.  Blogger is as touchy and erratic as Mother Nature these days--LOL!

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Enjoy your day!  May it be a fly-free, mistake-free day!  Well, maybe not mistake free.  :):)

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"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

James Joyce