After some exciting changes in my life in the past couple of months, I fell off the weekly art assignment wagon. But now I am back!
 
I started to re-frame these weekly art assignments as pieces  that teach me to be comfortable with breaking big ideas into smaller, incremental investigations. I am inspired by big productions so I think this is a worthy point of artistic growth.

For this weekly assignment, I drew my hand focusing on proportions and thoughtful attention to lighting. I love hands. They are always elegant and telling of personality and one's life. I also recently stopped biting my nails (yay!) so I wanted to show off! 

A friend of mine visited me recently and we had many wonderful and thought-provoking conversations. One of the conclusions from a conversation was that gratitude is an important element in reflection (not a novel concept but one of which we needed to convince ourselves.. If you need a little bit of convincing, please read the abstract to this study). 

Most people our age have likely had experiences with guided reflection: my friend was reminded of an end-of-day activity at camp in which each camper and counselor would tell the group their roses, buds. and thorns of the day (i.e. the good, the anticipated, and the difficult parts of their day, respectively). I love the concise nature of this exercise so I've decided to adopt this framework. I'm not going to share all of my roses, buds, and thorns because that would be frankly too revealing for me so(!) I'm starting a small series of drawings or artifacts that capture a rose, bud, or thorn of a week.

I'm a little late so please bear with me as I share an older rose: the companionship of my new puppy. 

I just got my new Converse shoes and they are flyyyyy. But, with these beauties, I'm running into a frequent problem: they are too wide. I have narrow feet with a high arch so after a day on my feet in fly-but-wide shoes, I'm  in a little bit of pain. I don't want to restrict my choices in shoes and sometimes I get around the width issues using some inserts, however, these always make the shoes heavy, don't really the width issues, and fall apart before the shoes do

After looking around the prosthetic and consumer product world, I can't find a solution I like so I jotted down a few ideas; some that already or could exist based on plastic today, some that would be a feature in a shoe, and others that could be a service or something: 

I love Jamie Wyeth's dramatic painting, "Berg," depicting a sunset on a cold day in Maine. I love the emotion, textures, and depth of color in this painting and want to make a response piece.

The multi-textured cape seeks drama, decisiveness, elegance, and humor. It doesn't take itself too seriously but it is cool as all get out. 

In this garment, I want to challenge myself by highlighting

• brightly-colored patterned fabric;
• new textures and weaves; and,
  
• a sleek and well-developed pattern.

My focus here is quality development so I've scaled back many extravagant ideas to the very basics. Maybe an inflating cape can happen next time (ha!).

Exploring spirit gum, inspired by clouds, lichen, and work of Lucy McRae & Bart Hess.