Blog Post Template

Remember that job interview I was going for last week?  I made a really cute post to go along with it…which is sitting on my desk staring at me right now.  I’ll get it up here eventually.  I remember telling myself all through the earlier part of the week, just make it to Wednesday, then you can relax.  I was half kidding, if you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that my life is anything but calm and quiet.  There were just a few major events to get through early in the week and then I would be back to business as usual.  So.  Wrong.  I have come down with…wait for it…shingles.  Seriously.  Like a return of the chicken pox.  The doctor totally berated me as he was diagnosing it – “Do you know what this is caused by?” – and due to the fact that I’d done a google search not more than an hour prior to this, I knew the answer – stress.  Stress!  It’s almost laughable!  Since when do I get overcome by stress?

However, I am trying to see the silver lining of this situation I am now finding my adult self in.  Even though my husband is keeping a three foot distance from me at all times, and I haven’t been able to wear a bra for four days now (gross – I know.  Sorry.) On top of that my workout schedule is going to hell in a handbasket – you try attempting a sweaty capoeira class with a rash all around right where your sports bra sits on your torso! However, I have had time to catch up on my blogging and even finally take in a few new ones.

Has anyone heard of Garance Dore?  My hero Inslee worships her.  I finally had the chance to read through her blog – not an easy feat as it is six years old and does not follow that classic chronological order that makes things easy to read, and it started in French – she started getting it translated into English a few years in.  Wow!  Run on sentences much?  Anyways.  She’s amazing.  At 25 she finally acknowledged that she wanted to be an illustrator, having never really drawn anything in her life!  She just kept at it, and you can see the crazy difference in how her style has progressed.  And now she’s done articles for French Vogue and everything.  So awesome!  I’ve been studying her style in her illustrated posts, and it makes me want to shake mine up a bit more.  I want mine to get looser.  The more I paint lately, the more I’ve been getting hung up in details that make everything just a touch too realistic for what I’m after.  It’s a fine line.

The image above – in addition to illustrating my current lazy state with using my photoshop skills – was a practice session I had over the weekend of trying to draw as quickly as possible the first images I found.  This exercise took just over half an hour.  In a 50 page sketchbook, with one session a week there’s bound to be a fair bit of improvement by the time I fill that up.

I also want to apologize for being so absent from the blogging world lately.  In trying to isolate the source of my stress (read: shingles) I felt the need to hide from the rest of the world for a little while.  I’m back now.  How is it going out there world?