Again. I have gotten a little bit off track again. I was doing ok, getting a post published every week to ten days and then these last couple of weeks happened. Nothing bad happened. Just regular stuff and some studying.
For the last three or four weeks, maybe five, I have been actively studying for a test in relation to the day job. It isn’t one they asked or suggested I take it was something that came up more on a whim. While I was on vacation last September, I took a one-day course that was for this certification. I was just taking it and didn’t realize, until after, that because it was instructor lead that I would get a voucher to take the test. Yay. Well, I’ve been putting it off. For a lot of reasons, one of which was that my preferred testing place was unavailable.
I finally decided, a few weeks ago that it was time to get this test done and move on to other things. When I looked up my testing options, my preferred testing location was available again, but only on Wednesdays. So, I decided to take the test. I thought about doing it while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago and decided not to because, I was on vacation, and I didn’t want to use up more vacation time on this. The short version of the rest of the story is that I have taken the test and passed. Yay me. Now, onto other things.
While I did spend more time studying for the test, I also spent time working on some art. I finished the Rhinoceros. It did need a little extra kick to make it pop a bit more. And now it is finished.
I continued to work on the Gretsch. I got the tailpiece completed and decided that the body needed one more layer of black. I should have stopped there.
I managed to finish that extra layer of black and then move on to the final details, the strap button at the bottom, the trim, and the strap. It was done and looking sharp. And I think I got a little too excited about how close to being done I was. I was impatient to do the varnish so it could dry and move off my art table.
Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the varnish. It wasn’t going on quite right, so I decided to take it off. This turns out to have been a bad idea. I lost at least some of the work I had done most recently as far as the fill in layers. I thought about trying to restore it to what it had been just minutes before and then decided not to. For one, the test areas that I did try to add to, didn’t seem to want to take. For two, my hands don’t have another week to ten days of working on this in them.
I have been looking forward to finishing up the Gretsch for a couple of weeks now. Mostly because working on it makes my hands really sore and tired. And, because I wanted to see it complete. Though I am a little disappointed in the results, due to my impatience, I am glad to finally have the piece finished.
With the Gretsch piece finished I’m at the ‘what next’ stage of things. And I’m not sure. If I had answered that question a day or two ago, I would have said, artistically, I think I’m going to do some experimenting. I have some photos that I took when I was in Australia that I would like to work up as paintings, drawings, or whatever. I am planning on exploring some mixed media work for them, and maybe some of the other photos my sister sent when she sent the picture of the rhino.
I’d also like to improve my digital painting skills. I’m thinking of doing some exercises like I did in my sketchbook projects only for digital. My goal for that is to get more familiar and comfortable with the digital tools that I have available and to improve my work on digital. There are things that I haven’t attempted digitally that I do on paper just fine. I’d like to get as comfortable doing those things on digital.
And I am going to return to the sketchbook project that I had to take a break from when my wrist got bad. There is a change to it though. I am not going to be doing it as a daily sketch. My goal is going to be to get at least one drawing complete per week. I am not going to set a time limit, other than 7 days, for how long it takes to finish. This means, I’ll have more time to correct things that I discover are off. And the quality? Accuracy of the drawing will hopefully be better.
And a day or two ago that would have been exactly how I was going to proceed next. Now, having passed that test and finished the Gretsch, I feel like I have some space freed up in my brain and I kind of want to ‘start fresh’. That’s the nice thing about having a big or time-consuming project finally end. We don’t realize how much space they have been taking up in our brain and then it’s done, and that space is all freed up again. It’s like having a big open warehouse space that you just shipped everything out of and now you can sweep up and get ready for the next shipment, or project. That’s where I’m at. I’m ready to sweep up, stack the boxes, take out the refuse and then decide what I want to bring in to work on. It may take a few weeks; I have a several weekends in a row that I will be doing work for the day job, and that may slow down my sweeping up and such. Then again, I could get a bee in my bonnet one day and suddenly be armpit deep in the next project.