It seems this is the month of family dentistry. Between my family and myself, there’s been a lot of time with me in waiting rooms with still more to come. Appointments apparently don’t give a flying fig about trying to run a business. C’est la vie.
A lot of the art focus has been on the current WIP (about 40% done), a landscape-y thing that was more the notion of a Muse than myself. (Who am I to argue with a Muse?) I’m using it as an opportunity to try a couple of different techniques — techniques that I’m learning should perhaps be done better with some different brushes than what I have on hand. Still…bristles are bristles and I’m making do. Not being primarily a landscape painter makes me cautious about investing in yet more brushes that I will use only infrequently. Still… if I do many more trees and stuff, I might have to bite the bullet on this one.
Something different: I’m once again practicing the recorder. For much of my life, I’ve played guitar (not so much in recent years), and in my twenties I devoted a fair amount of practice to the flute. Wanting to play a wind instrument again, but not knowing where my flute is (or wanting to pay to refurbish the thing if I do find it), I opted to put a little more focus on the recorder. I’d dabbled a bit a while back; as a result, I happen to have a soprano (descant) recorder on-hand. So, that’s been eating up an hour or so a day. Seems old fingers aren’t quite as nimble as young ones, but muscle memory is helping me along. I do find the soprano a bit shrill, so I might ask birthday-Santa for a tenor recorder so the tone is more comfortable.
I am also once again researching affordable methods for transferring my old negatives and slides to digital. A big reason you don’t see many old images of mine is that I simply don’t have many available. I scanned a few a couple of decades ago when I had a few hours with a negative scanner — whose resolution is laughable by today’s standards. So, I have a few pics digitized. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on this, and ideally I’ll have use of whatever device after the transfer is done. That pretty much means either a scanner or a digital camera attachment. Given the spotty reviews of a lot of scanners, especially following OS updates, I’m sort of leaning in the direction of the latter.
That’s pretty much been it this week at the ol’ Casa. Except for the tooth stuff, it’s been pretty straightforward. That’s going to end soon with necessary home maintenance, which is sad as my wallet only just stopped crying from the abuse it received over the holidays.
