winter activities and the monster came to play

Here’s my annual cuttings of the yellow angel trumpet and the morning glory bush in water to root in case the ones in the ground don’t come back.

And it is cold out. Below freezing when I got up yesterday morning and when I wrote this it had just then creeped up to 33˚, clear blue winter sky and a little windy. My workroom was ablaze with prisms in the morning. Minnie and I ventured out before noon once it hit 40˚ and nothing looked damaged but we had another night a few degrees below freezing coming last night. This morning, obvious signs of damage, some total like the cosmos, others just bit like the fire spike, some still seemingly unaffected like the shrimp plant.

I returned the two books to the library Saturday that I’ve had out for over a month. One went back without even opening the cover and the other, that weird book by Keanu Reeves and China Milville, The Book Of Elsewhere, went back unfinished. After about 80 pages in I decided I was done with it. For one thing I haven’t had any real reading time as we’ve been streaming 6 seasons of (sci-fi) The Expanse and have started watching The Outlaws. Anyway, it’s rare for me to return a book unfinished. Usually I’ll plow through it on general principal even if I’m not invested in the story but the library called wanting their books back. 

Of course I didn’t just take books back, I also checked one out. It’s an anthology, Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits. Ellison was a science fiction writer (though hard to categorize his work) and one of my favorite authors back in my late teens and twenties when I read science fiction almost exclusively, before I started delving into the origins of religion and myth, buddhism and taoism, theosophy and new age, Campbell and Jung. Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Ellison’s works so this will be a little walk down memory lane.

So, The Outlaws. There’s three seasons and we just started season 2. It’s a British crime thriller comedy on Prime. We started watching it because it has Christopher Walken in it so we figured it had to be good. The premise is 7 individuals from completely different walks of life thrown together doing community service instead of jail time for their infractions as they get drawn into some serious crime while trying to save their lives and the lives of their families. 

This little monster came over Sunday and played while her daddy worked across the street in the shop. I was instructed to draw camping and then rain. She colored in my outline of the tent. Also drawn on demand was fire, an octopus, and skipping (a little human figure with wild arms and legs and wild hair) while she drew snakes and many legged octopi that turned into spiders that turned into birds.

The blue leg kicking up is from Paisleigh skipping, the pink is me not skipping and her octopus/spider/bird.

I’ve started on the new painting, putting the first underlying color on the anthers. This first image is very frustrating because it doesn’t look anything like what is actually on the paper. What I have so far is almost consistently a lighter lemon yellow with some overlay of an oranger yellow but still very subtle all done while it was still wet. This picture is more like the direction I’m going to take it as if it’s a future picture, work I haven’t done yet, and no amount of dickering with exposure, shadow, temperature, contrast is getting rid of the intensity or the enhanced color value.