Trouble in the Wood Shed (and worse trouble in the courtyard)

Dear Sarah - Day 68 of our daily drawing exchange

Hi Nikki,
March 9, 2025

Ah, daylight savings time. What a joy it is to wake up on a rainy Sunday and realize you've lost an hour of your precious day. Who knew that you would be seized by a cleaning frenzy, which included purging the bathroom cupboards, washing all my bedding, putting on a new duvet cover (man, I hate putting on duvet covers) clearing about my storage room, and generally dusting, vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing and wondering what to do with my old hair scrunchies. Then, because I was on a roll, I did a half hour weight routine. After a shower and a quick visit with a friend, I sat down to draw, even though I really wanted a nap.

First, for a laugh, I drew a cover for our book. It's very bad, but funny. Then I decided to draw (from a photo) my grandson in a park on a weird piece of equipment that doesn't make any sense except for what he's doing. It's an improvement over the last drawing I did of him on a log on a beach, but the proportions aren't quite right. And it doesn't look like him AT ALL. No chance of anyone recognizing him. Still, I think his pants look okay.

And once again, it's time to make dinner. Last art class tomorrow.

I have to bring an object to draw in three different media. Pencil, ink, charcoal. But what to bring?

XO S

Hi Sarah!

Well, all day long today as I was driving all over Calgary looking at houses, I thought I had bumped the clock in the car as it was no longer in synch with my phone. LOL - you’d think THAT might have triggered an ‘ah-ha!’ moment, but no. It wasn’t until the very end of the day when I saw a social media post from yesterday kindly reminding me to let my clock spring ahead that I realized what had happened!

Fortunately, I believed my phone and not the car and so did not miss any appointments. Sheesh.

Anyway, rushed back to my hotel in time for a Zoom meeting and then decided to pull up a photo (another from Spain) to tackle the courtyard from above in what I thought might be a quick drawing. Hah!

What the heck was I thinking????? What an impossible collection of lines, curves, angles, that don’t make sense! I fought my brain (a cupola goes like this, silly), when I’m pretty sure I have seen few cupolas from above so really, what does my brain know of this subject? Not much! After these hedges and pillars and columns and whatnots tied my brain/hand/eye in knots (the more I looked, the worse it got), I gave up.

So, we have here a contender for the ‘before, waaaaaay before’ collection. Let’s hope that the afters show some improvement. Looking at this, how could they not?

I like the way the book cover resembles, in shape, a woodshed. Very meta!

Also, the strange twisty thing along which your grandson is draped is most peculiar. I suppose maybe playground designers were thinking of minimizing the distance a child might fall should they slip off.

Until tomorrow -
Nikki