adventures

of aplantfancier

Tag: watercolor

  • puppy101

    I’m working on layering some detail into the grass this morning, down in the furnace workshop. I’ve got towels going in the laundry room outside the saloon doors, and upstairs I hear the rattle of the puppy’s stuffed worm, a hand-me-down from the cat, and the telltale thump of a jump down from the bed, where she knows she is not allowed.

    I knew puppies were like babies, but like nothing can prepare you for the reality of a baby, human or otherwise.

    We’re on day 7, and I finally kind-of slept last night. It’s trash day, and I’ve already been out with her on the leash three times, watching the trucks, getting treats, bristling, getting treats, mostly not barking, getting treats. She’s beginning to deescalate.

    She’s fascinating. I’ve loved training the cat, and so even though the puppy is unfamiliar, in some ways she’s easier. Many of the same concepts apply. They’re both food motivated, but the puppy is biddable, the puppy wants to please me.

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  • WIP

    Hi, welcome! I have a confession to make. I’ve been meeting puppies. I’ve been reading dog books and stalking dog reddit and trying to get “AI” to tell me what kinds of dogs these rescue pups are. Trying to see the future. Medium, or big, or perhaps extremely big? Can I picture that? Will this dog be kind to my cat? Can I know that somehow?

    Meanwhile I’m plugging away at the little adventure comic and plugging away at the laundry, down in the basement, snow piling up outside and muting the light trickling in through the glass block windows.

    I’ll have to get up early and shovel before I go to work, but I can only be glad. I put 50 plants in the ground in the last weeks before the weather turned, a garden hail mary. The more snow the better. One year we got so much, even the gladiolas made it.

    I’ve got all the lamps on; the little 70s swivel neck I found in the basement of my apartment in Seattle near 15 years ago, the green glass bankers lamp on the bench, the silver clamp lights I paint under.

    I swept and vacuumed the floors, and dusted the worst of the cobwebs, and now I’m here, brush in hand, thinking.

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  • how it’s going

    It’s laundry day again, down in the furnace workshop. Everything’s sorted into little heaps and I’m here at the bench drawing the next page of I, Triangle Head while the machines chug away.

    I’ve already churned through the guest sheets and towels. Now I’m deep into clothes, a load of denim, a load of tees and sweaters. Have I mentioned that I love doing laundry?

    I’m coming to you from the Sunday before Christmas. The guest bed’s stacked away to a twin and remade for one (the cat, sleeping in the middle of the day). The presents are neatly wrapped under the tree, and I’ve been hard at work all week, scheduling my blog through the end of the year so that I can be present over the holidays.

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  • hashtag goals

    It’s that time of year again, reader. Time to look back and look forward while the year winds down. Time to have a tiny little existential crisis and set a bunch of intentions and then just hold on for dear life when nothing goes as planned.

    I felt really stuck and overwhelmed all last year, but suddenly I look around and I realize I’ve managed to wrest a new reality out of the old one, and I think I’ll be much happier here. Maybe change is always painful, even when it’s good. Does everyone else already know that?

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  • adventures in going overboard

    Company’s coming day after tomorrow and outside it’s still snowing and snowing and snowing. We usually don’t get much til late winter. All bets are off I think.

    The cat is over her cold, and we went out for a while this morning to stamp around in the backyard, marking out our pathways, stopping to observe where they intersect with the rabbit road.

    They’ve already eaten the raspberries down to the ground.

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  • content is king

    Laundry day. I’ve got towels and sheets and clothes of various temperature requirements lined up in little heaps. The laundry room is right next to the furnace workshop, through a pair of slatted saloon doors, so it’s the chore of choice when I can’t tear myself away from whatever I’m working on. Something is getting done. Not much else, but something.

    And also art.

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  • 10 reasons why no one’s reading your blog

    I’ve been continuing today in sorting through old paintings, and doing some writing in a pretty new A5 binder I started last week. It’s faux camel suede, with nice KOKUYO loose leaf paper inside, the same setup I’m using for my languishing novel.

    The blog needed its own space for notes and ideas and little chunks of prose. And of course I’m indexing it because I’m a freak for organization. Does anyone else write every other page in their binders upside down or is that just me? If you know you know.

    Or maybe it really is just me, because so far it’s not really working out.

    Come along now while I put some paint to paper, and have a few cups of tea in the furnace workshop. But first stare into that radioactive sky a while. Doesn’t that cloud look like Alaska?

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  • smth new

    I pulled out a few older paintings while organizing the workshop today and thought this one deserved another look. Yes, I know it’s not Thursday, July 24th.

    So go ahead and have a look while I get my thoughts together.

    Go on, drift away a minute on that viridian sea.

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  • who is this even for?

    Someone told me recently that I should be working on my art for me, not to seek recognition. Huh. Does it mean something bad about me that I see no reason to make art that I don’t intend to share? To seek recognition implies, I think, a desire for accolades. I do seek recognition, but literally just that — to be recognized. I see no reason to tell this story to myself, as I already know it. I want to tell it to you.

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  • the fool

    This year, a data loss left me with only a handful (here below, one of that handful) of the images of planets I’ve collected playing No Man’s Sky. Hundreds of beautiful coincidences of color and form and light. Crushing, though I do feel a little bit silly, being so crushed.

    But they weren’t just random screenshots, they were an extension of my photography, something I poured a lot of creative energy into, and more, they were the references I paint from, so they represent this huge lost potential — now they’re all paintings that will never exist.

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