Impression on a Bus

or, making use of the moments between

If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, “I will start work on my book [learn to paint/travel more/learn to bake bread/knit/whatever] when I have more time…” well, I’d be a wealthier woman than I am. This is not a statement about the health of my bank account, but rather a reflection on the way we too often use time as an excuse not to get going on whatever it is our heart longs to be doing.

Take today - it was an overflowing day. We are going away for a week and we have a house-sitter coming to keep an eye on things. My significant other is working in the neighbouring town for the weekend so I spent much of the day cleaning, prepping the guest room, making trips to the recycling bins, doing laundry, thinking about what to pack, dealing with emails and stuff I don’t want to deal with while I’m away - you know, all that last-minute prep stuff that can devour hours of your time.

Also on the schedule today was my two-hour critique group session which, seriously, I only miss if I’m in a coma.

Then, I had to get on a bus (in the dark, a relevant detail for reasons you’ll learn in a moment) and travel to the aforementioned neighbouring town to stay overnight with my dearly beloved so I could also take care of some business in said town first thing in the morning (those details irrelevant, but you can see that I suddenly had run out of day and, yes, I had not had time to do any art or write this post).

What to do? It was pitch dark (and bumpy) on the bus, so even though I had a sketchbook in my bag, I couldn’t make use of it. But I did have my phone and this nifty app (Adobe Fresco) which I haven’t been using much but which, it suddenly occurred to me, could be really helpful in a situation where there was a) limited time, b) no light, and c) a truly wobbly line caused by a bump in the road could be removed with a simple tap of the undo button.

I found a photo of Dad I’d taken in his studio perhaps a year before he died. He’s holding up a painting - done in an unusual style for him, which is why he was showing it to me. We were talking about exploring new techniques for familiar subject matter.

Here’s the photo:

Once I had the photo in the app I then added a layer on top, my drawing layer. The photo itself was on its own layer and I dialled the opacity way down so I couldn’t see any more than the major shapes shining through onto my drawing layer. (This, I suppose, is the high-tech equivalent of last night’s project and cheater contour drawings - see yesterday’s newsletter).

From there, I used my finger and a couple of different sizes of ‘pencil’ tool to draw in the basic image by tracing over the hazy image used as a rough guide. For the background, I used a watercolour ‘brush’ and splotched some colour around.

It’s FAR from perfect. I am a total beginner using this sort of program and barely have control of my fingers at the best of times, never mind on a bus in the dark. But, the end result is more interesting than the photo (I think) and I could imagine something like that being used somewhere in the graphic novel. It could be in a section where we talk about monochromatic paintings, or compare several tree paintings (each using a totally different technique), or even the value of continuing to experiment and play with your art well into your 80s.

If I had said, “oh well, too bad - this was a truly hectic day and I clearly don’t have time to attempt any art,” then this little piece wouldn’t have come into being.

Grab those moments whenever you find them - none of us knows how many more of them we might have left.

Until tomorrow - ciao!

Curious about that writing and critique group I mentioned? Check out Writers on Fire by clicking on that nifty blue button below. Interesting… didn’t know I could make my own buttons. Cool!