Blog

(SPOILER ALERT - if you want my xmas card to be a surprise, don't look)

I ran out of time and energy yesterday and the result was that I had no drawing to post. I did do something creative however. I printed the first color for this year's 4-color lino-cut xmas cards. This year, I've gotten more ambitious than in years past in several ways:

This started out as a drawing of my feet while I sit in front of the TV watching college football. It then morphed into something completely different (which was always the plan). I struggled with my left foot on the bike trainer today, so maybe that's why I focused on my feet tonight.

I spent most of tonight working on carving the linoleum plate for the first color on this year's Xmas card. I thought about using the carving as today's "drawing," but after careful consideration, I've decided to save writing a blog about the card process until after they're sent because I want to keep them a surprise. So after carving, it's NO surprise that the hand imagery is back in tonight's drawing.

This drawing had two inspirations. The first was a dead tree that I saw while I was out running today. The second is a book that I'm currently reading called The Rook: A Novel, by Daniel O'Malley. (Spoiler alert!) One of the main villains in the novel is an organization called The Grafters who do some very interesting things with body parts and implants. Anyway, this drawing disappointed me and I worked on it way too long to no avail, but I don't have time to draw something else because I feel the need to start working on my Xmas cards ASAP - Thanksgiving just ended.

Today I had a shoulder arthrogram - it's an MRI with contrast done by injecting dye into the joint. Before the MRI part, I got to watch the injection process on an x-ray. It took longer that normal because my shoulder joint was causing trouble for the needle and the doctor had to come in and wrench things around to get the dye flowing. The whole time I just prayed that it didn't all of a sudden get ultra painful (it didn't) and watched my shoulder joint on the x-ray. It got me thinking about joints and - I suppose, ultimately led to this drawing.

I think this is a drawing of what's wrong with my shoulder. Tomorrow I have an appointment to get an MRI to find out what's actually wrong. I wonder what it will look like. I hope I'll be able to swim again soon - well, I hope what's wrong can be fixed so I can swim without worrying about it. Anyway, here's the drawing.

My husband Jim thinks I have some kind of finger fetish lately - he says I keep drawing things that look like hands. I don't know why I keep with this imagery but it's whatever comes out once I start drawing. Today I put down my beloved Sharpie felt tip and dug up an ancient 0.25 mm Rapidograph pen and a vial of India ink. It took me several hours to bring it back to life but it was so worth it to have that micro-line of ink to work with. I think what's really happening is I am developing a pen fetish.

Subscribe to

friends and sponsors