Ink and Carbon Pencil 6×9 Inches
I’ve been under the weather this week which means that I haven’t gotten much done. Nothing too bad. My sinuses have been hurting a bit but mostly I’ve been tired. That means a lot of sitting down in a chair and even taking a couple of naps a day. It was mostly from Friday to Sunday but as I write this on Tuesday I’m still not back to one hundred percent. I got all my paying work done but being that all of my artwork is made while standing up everything came to a halt. Except for two art cards. Even sitting down and writing is fatiguing. I never think about writing as being tiring but I did a small bit of writing on Sunday and then had to take a nap. Weird.
I did catch up on some TV show watching as I rested. I watched season three of “Justified”. That’s a fun show based on an Elmore Leonard story about a present day US Marshal who works out of Kentucky which is where he was also born and raised. He is, of course, a bad-ass who doesn’t play by the rules. It’s part police drama, part monster of the week show, and part soap opera all with a bit of humor thrown in. I like it. The lesson of season three is that if you want a bad-ass federal marshal to do what you say then threatening his pregnant ex-wife is probably not the right thing to do. You’ll probably just end up dead.
Carbon Pencil 2.5×3.5 Inches
The art cards I made were of scary monster faces. I drew them with a Wolfe’s carbon pencil. I’ve made these monster faces before. I did a few years ago on 11×14 inch paper with charcoal but more recently I’ve made some on 6×9 inch paper with India ink and a little color marker. Some are scarier than others but in general I find them interesting to make. I decided to make 6×9 inch scary face with the carbon pencil but found that the scale of the pencil was off. It was too small for the big marks I wanted to make. I ended up finishing the drawing by mixing ink and brush drawing with the carbon pencil. It came out okay but not really what I wanted.
That is when I moved to the smaller 2.5×3.5 inch art card size. Even though that was smaller than I initially wanted to work the scale fit the carbon pencil better. Not to mention that I was fatigued and could only get a small drawing done. I got one done on Saturday and one on Sunday. That was the extent of my art for the weekend. It did give me an idea for a story I want to write though. I want to write a scary story to go along with some scary drawings. My fiction writing hasn’t been that prolific lately so we’ll see.
A second show that I caught up on during my resting was season three of “Girls”. I had already watched the first two seasons and found it up and down. It could be amusing and it could be annoying. I almost didn’t bother with season three but that would have been my loss because the show has really hit its stride. I think all the characters have found their sweet spot of crazy. Keep in mind that this isn’t a show where everybody is nice and likable. The characters are flawed and often annoying. But this season I think they are more relatable. And more entertaining. I now unequivocally like the show.
I haven’t been able to bike ride in nearly a week since my sinuses have knocked me down. That seems par for the course this winter since we’ve had so much snow and cold. I’ve missed more riding days in the last two and a half months than I have in the last two and a half years. I’m not going to sweat it though since I’ll be back in the saddle soon enough. If it was warmer out I might have gone on a ride today as I’m almost better but the cold winter continues to hang on. It’s mid-March and it’s still twenty-something degrees Fahrenheit in the morning at my riding time. That’s crazy.
Ink and Marker 6×9 Inches
One other TV show that I’ve been watching as I’ve been sitting here is a British show called “Fresh Meat”. It’s in its third nine episode season and is a comedy about a group of college student who all live together in a house. I’m nearing the end of season two and it’s okay. Not great but okay enough to watch. Sometimes the accents are a little to thick for me and they use a bit of slang that I don’t always get but it’s fun.
A funnier show that I recently discovered is one called “Broad City” on Comedy Central. I heard the two stars of the show on Artie Lange’s radio show and thought they were funny so I tracked down their show which they were out promoting. It’s a half hour comedy about the two young women living in New York City. There is a lot of off-color and bawdy humor so you’d better like that sort of thing. I like it. It’s one of those fast paced comedies that flies by filled with jokes and weirdness. That’s up my alley.
Oddly enough I was sick last year at this very same time. That one kicked my ass a lot more though. I was down for a week. I remember have a sore throat for the first time in years and years and sleept through most of the day for a few days. Though no fun this is probably a quarter of what that was. I’m lucky enough not to have gotten sick a lot in my life but the last few years if I’ve had something it seems to always be sinus based. My head clogs up a bit and I get tired. I have no idea what it is but all things considered it’s not too bad if it’s the only sickness I have to contend with. I’ll take the old cliche, “At least you’ve got your health” any day of the week.
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