Today

Listening to Lou Reed (Walk on the Wild Side), OneRepublic (Good Life), Patty Smyth (The Warrior, Goodbye to You), Portugal The Man (Feel it Still), Sam Fender (The Borders), Tracy Chapman (Fast Car).

Complicated (sorta) morning followed by a hopefully leaner more streamlined afternoon 😊

Rechecked my latest reblog from SilverSneakers, this one re weight loss!

Making cereal breakfast early, so Sheila can grocery shop at Sprouts, so I can leave & head to the print so I can take some needed restock prints to the Old Bakery. Hope to have a post on the restock tomorrow. All goes well this will be my 1st time to go to the Old Bakery two weeks running since, hmmm, late August? And before that, early May?

Well, moving & surgeries’ll do that for ya, lol! 😊

If I’m lucky, I’ll still get my steps in today.

And if I’m really lucky – do all that and paint today ❤️

Yesterday

Yesterday two main avenues played themselves out throughout the full day.

One was my daily walking, and the other was my increasingly daily painting.

Both are resurgences beginning to resurface and re-establish themselves as dominant concerns in my every day life. Which I’m glad of, though there are challenges. How could it be otherwise, right? 😊

I’d mentioned in yesterday’s My Day Ahead I’d cracked 9000+ steps. Well, I actually ended up topping 10,000. Hadn’t done that in a very long time, and I felt it almost the whole day yesterday, with an unusual (for me) pain in my upper IT band in my right leg. I’d last had problems with my IT band around 2010 and learned to use a roller w/specific exercises to un-kink & strengthen it. But my recent consecutive-ness of walking back to my pre-2 surgeries level (which ended about late May), must have re-aggravated it. So yesterday (Tuesday), I scaled back (hobbled back? 😂) to a very respectable 7500+ . My reblog post for today, via SilverSneakers, though targeted to info re weight loss, has, as I mention in my intro to it, with applications beyond for seniors, and, weight loss, specifically, has this – my fav from the article – it’s ok to cheat 😊 ie, moderation vs strict adherence!

So if Monday I overdid via walking, yesterday, I overdid via painting ❤️

I’ve been working my way back to painting more regularly, or at all, since I hadn’t painted at all since mid-May, when we began our move, then, by late May, began getting the multi-hour gastro pain attacks leading to my trip to the ER.

Then, yesterday, with the forecast strongly suggesting sunshine’ll be scarce in the coming few days, I went past my daily short stint at the easel with a second short sitting (I rarely stand like I used to up to about a decade ago), then, after lunch, for a time-was-forgotten multi-hour session til dusk. I also knew that today (Wed) I’d be busy going to the printer, restocking at the Old Bakery, plus the drive times. I guess I cheated, so to speak, in reverse, splurging cause I knew I’d have to do without for most if not the day today. I think that made sense, lol!

In the same way I become more and more aware of my body as I continue rebuilding my walking routine, not to mention exactly how the weather – the sky, the air, sounds – is doing, I also am becoming more and more aware of how my painting process is doing.

For a few days, in my short session days, I was enjoying rediscovering highlighting little curling ridges of paint, adding a shadow line above or below another ridge line of paint – something I’d read Monet often did after a point in his career. I’d often wondered why he’d felt he’d needed to do that. After all, when light hit the textured paint, the light would create the highlights. I’d also wondered why some of my paintings seemed flatter at times, sometimes permanently, after I’d finished them. That was one of the things I‘ve thought about during my recent painting renaissance. Renaissance of spirit if nothing else, lol!

I’ve mentioned how I’m repeating (in a Hegelian spiral shift sort of way) something I worked to great success with my painting, Austin at Night, which was to take make prints of photos I’d take while in-progress. It gave me a perspective of where I was at and what I wanted – in real time, not when I 1st started the painting. Only now, until I decide about getting a projector to easily view my captured stages of my work-in-progress, I’m using my iPhone’s screen (had to reset it’s go-dark time so’s not to have to constantly re-tap the screen to keep it active).

Having a screenshot of my original, taken with indirect side light, lets the highlights on the paint ridges literally shine! I then compared it my original (12×16 canvas), and started recreating my “finished” work 😊

I also tinkered with my tonal settings (black point esp), and my warmth/cool setting, tinkered until I saw something I wished I’d painted, and set out to see if I can come close, or, find something else along the way I like as much ❤️

One of the latter is, though I’d originally really liked my muted almost grayish infused version of In the Light, I really much prefer warmer tones 💕

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My Latest Blog Posts

• July 31, 2021 – Prepping a New 16×20 Acrylic, Working Title : Testing the WaterJuly 31, 2021
  The initial goal was to simply select and mark the area for my figure. Then I freely applied Golden’s light molding paste, leaving the selected area for my figure much more level, and forming the paste into potentially vegetative designs as inspiration and malleable ground meshed —
• July 30, 2021 – What a Difference a New Keyboard Makes : LENRICH iPad pro 12.9 case with keyboardJuly 30, 2021
  This is an older now discontinued keyboard, but one of the few still available for my IPad Pro 2nd generation model (current model is 5th generation I believe), but I’m impressed with it enough to post about it and (if all continues well) my renewed ease of use not having to use the onscreen keyboard for blog posts, emails etc – that’s a big deal for me, lol! 😊
• July 29, 2021 – Whew! Yesterday Was a Day of Plowing Through, lol!July 29, 2021
  Above is a picture of me November 2019 (notice the weather is warm but hot, finally 😊) and I look just a bit worn out? I’d just climbed the 218 steps to top of Old Baldy near Wimberley Texas! That’s kinda how I felt yesterday, only without as nice a view, lol! I’ll just say that….
• July 28, 2021 – New 25×40 #Acrylic on Canvas In-Progress : Barton Springs Greenbelt Indian SummerJuly 28, 2021
  A chore heat filled day where my keyboard evidently is deciding it’s had it, lol! Hopefully I finish this post 😊 Basically I started the groundwork for my newest painting, acrylic, wanting to settle on my composition before hand, unlike how I handled my just finished watercolor, same size, where I inserted my figure at the end.
• July 27, 2021 – 4 Weeks Running! My Most Viewed Image For the Week @FineArtAmerica, Summer is a Lady : #Watercolor on Paper #ContemporaryImpressionismJuly 27, 2021
  I’m sure I’ve had images repeat as most viewed 4 times in a row, but I wasn’t paying as much attention to that as I try to nowadays 😊 Summer is a Lady continues to simmer atop my selection of photos and artwork and illustrated poetry ♥️
• July 26, 2021 – Where I Left Off Before Our Trip, New #Watercolor on Canvas Completed : Barton Springs Greenbelt Indian SummerJuly 26, 2021
  I just took another look at my newly completed painting (above) to try for some settled sentiment I can include for my post, and I do have that – some settled sentiment. I’m still digesting and assimilating what this new work means to me. Though I know it’s incomplete, because I also know this work is more a conscious marker of where I want to head, and feel compelled to head toward, I do have a grasp enough to point out some things that are making themselves more known to me.
• July 25, 2021 – Where I Left Off Before Our Trip, New Watercolor on Canvas in-progress, Developing the Right Figure to AddJuly 25, 2021
  As you can tell from my top pic, my efforts to progress from my value study and digital studies below are not going great, lol! I take solace from several things —

Thanks so much everyone! 😊

Adan

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