More spring rain

I don't know about your neck of the woods, but here in Wisconsin it's starting to feel like spring will never come.  It's day after day of rainy/snowy/gloomy weather.  Yuck!  Poor Amelia wants to wear her spring jacket, but I keep telling her to put her winter one on.  I have hardly done anything in my garden.    Really though, I shouldn't be complaining, considering what the people in the south are having to go through.  What a mess between so many tornadoes and flooding.  Pretty scary weather.  

I did get the commission/job that I talked about in my previous post.  I turned in my finished piece yesterday.  I hope they like it.  It is for a local event this summer.  It was a wonderful learning experience to say the least, but I'm glad to be finished.  After working on the commission over the last few weeks, I have so many ideas and things that I want to work on of my own.  I did the little birdies above yesterday.  It's a small piece for me, on a 8x10 piece of watercolor paper.   I was so happy to be finished with my previous painting, I wanted to do a piece that required very little thinking and a lot of just going with the flow.  It has lots of nice spring colors that I'm not finding outside my window yet. 

Weekends

Not very spring like pictures are they?  We woke up Saturday with snow on the ground.  Fischer said "it looks like we skipped summer and went to fall".  It never even warmed up enough on Saturday to melt all the snow.  Over the weekend Amelia kept saying "I want the snow to go away".  Even though none of us were too happy to see all that white stuff, the kids still seemed to enjoy themselves with snowman making.  They made 2 for our yard and then we went to their cousins house and there they made a whole snowman family.




It seems when I start to get stressed out, posting on my blog seems to be the first thing that goes.   I guess it's not on the top of my priority list.  I wish I could change that and become more regular with my posting.  This past week I was working on my first possible commission for a local event.  I had to turn in my sketches this past Friday and will find out whether I got it or not.   Needless to say, this past week I felt like I was on the edge of freaking out with the stress of it all.  I'm used to just doing my own thing and painting or drawing when I feel like, and not having certain requirements for my work.  It reminded me of art school and the whole brainstorming process, but much more stressful.  I'm not sure if I'm cut out for this type of work.  I found it hard  to be creative with a really short deadline, house hold duties, a kitchen studio and  3 year old talking in my ear almost non stop.  If I do something like this again, I'll have to figure out how to handle the stress better for me and my family.



Here's a piece that I started last weekend.  No requirements, no deadline, I'm doing it just because I want to.  I think I like it that way best. 



These pictures of Amelia were taken the previous weekend where temperatures reached 81!  What a difference from one weekend to the next.  

Side tracked

Last Friday I picked up a book from our library called the Three "Only" Things, by   Robert Moss.  I learned about it on Jessica Swift's blog during this post.  The book is about tapping into the power of dreams, coincidence and imagination.  I've always been fascinated with dreams and if a night goes by where I don't remember any dreams I feel almost as if it was a wasted nights sleep.  He talks about how we can solve problems in our sleep and to look for the deeper meaning within them.    He recommends keeping a dream journal.  I've tried to keep dream journals in the past, but it never lasts long, so I started again.  As soon as I picked up this book on Friday, reading it  was all I could think about.  It was such a fascinating book.   Fortunately I finished it on Tuesday, but now I'm waiting for another book of his to come in at the library called Conscious Dreaming.



I tend to get very obsessed with good books and find I can't do anything else or get anything done.  Sometimes if I'm reading a really good novel and I can't put it down, I have to make deals with myself to get things done.  For instance, I'll tell myself that if I get the dishes done, then I can read a few pages, or when I get the bathrooms cleaned then I can finish the chapter.  It can get kind of annoying actually and kind of consumes my energy.  Needless to say, I haven't read a lot of books lately for that reason, but there are times when I just need to get lost in a good book.





Since reading this book though, my brain feels completely blocked creatively.  I haven't painted since last Thursday.  I've sat down to draw and with the intention to paint but when I start, nothing feels right and nothing inspires.  I even had a few ideas that I wanted to do for paintings prior to reading this book, but I can't get interested in them.  I think this book got me thinking so much and in a different way that all my energy was going towards it.  I'm anxiously waiting for the next book, but at the same time it would be nice to do a little painting or drawing.   I feel like my "block" is  related to the amazing power of our subconscious and it needs to work through and process what I read.  I started writing this post this morning and am finally finishing it up tonight and I'm starting to feel that "block" starting to loosen up a bit.  Yeah!

Cheerily, cheer up

I think Mother Nature decided to play a bit of an April Fool's joke on us here in Wisconsin.  I opened the blinds this morning and was shocked to see a totally white landscape spread out before me.  Fortunately it melted as the day went along, but what a dreary and damp day.  I had to keep reminding myself that yes, it is spring and it will warm up.
There was one day a few weeks ago that Amelia kept saying "cheer up, cheerily, cheer up", through out the day.   She had learned this little saying for the robins last year when we would listen to our bird CD, but it had been a long time since we had listened to it.  A few days later after she had been saying this , we saw our first robin.  It's kind of a strange little coincidence wouldn't you say?
I've always wondered why the state bird of Wisconsin is the robin, it's not the prettiest bird out there and it leaves us  for the winter.  Why not the bold little chickadee or the vibrant cardinal or even the noisy blue jay? They all brave  the tough Wisconsin winters, unlike the robin who heads for warmer weather.   This spring more than ever, I've come to realize the significance of the robin.  Everyone both young and old always looks forward to seeing their first robin of the spring, because it always means the same thing, that spring is here.  I love that their song is described as  "cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily", because that is what we do when we see our first robin of the spring.