The Weekend Update

It seems I have lost the entire week of blogging opportunities. I had wanted to do another What's Going On Wednesday but ran out of time and just never got back to it-hence, The Weekend Update! There's always a fix if you look hard enough, right?

So! What a week-we've lost David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Dan Haggerty...Cancer's got its glutton on--enough is enough already! Keith Richards at least, still alive and well, probably always will be. Thank heaven for small favors.

But, a little closer to home--the hubs and I ventured out to a new art supply store in Somerset last weekend, Riverside Art--this place is an artist's dream! I'm almost a little afraid to go back...I had to rein myself in being with my other half--but holy mackerel! What a great place! When you first walk into the store you enter their gallery where they have displayed all these beautiful creations from local artists--it's like a special little art show! Down below the gallery is their art supply store and they have the best of the best-no penny ante Michaels or AC Moore crafty student grade art supplies, this is the real deal! I drooled through aisles of pastels, paints, papers, pens, pencils, rulers, books, canvas, easels...a sugar starved kid set loose in a Willy Wonka level candy store! I gathered up a small selection of goodies that I couldn't forgive myself for if I'd left the store without them, and THEN! We got our own personal tour of their scanning/Giclee printing rooms! Okay, I completely geeked out over this. Their Cruse scanner has a room all its own--it's gianormous! And their printers, huge--three or four of them--I was too excited for it all to really sink in--top of the line, state of the art, beyond all coolness...Kim, their printing pro, let me drool over some of the prints she'd been working on from another artist's amazing sketchbook--it all made my mind spin! I walked out of the store with a zillion ideas to play with and super excited for the day I let myself go back for more goodies!

And, home at last, I've been busy playing with a few odd things through the week...I've been completely obsessed with graphite abstracts lately, so decided to create an inspiration board for my arting area. I printed out some pretties found on Pinterest and hung them on a simple cork board bought at Walmart:

 

And this little guy is from one of the books I posted last week that I'm working through: Draw Realistic Animals by Robert Caldwell. Husky fur is challenging so I'm taking my time with it--no rush, it is just a practice piece after all. He's still got a long way to go but I'm happy with his progress so far!

 

This morning I came across a bullet journal challenge on the Tiny Ray of Sunshine blog--to create a daily focus log. I have so many little project ideas and inspirations, even if I manage to jot them down into my bullet journal, they often get overlooked and eventually forgotten. So Kim's Focus challenge seemed like a great accountability tracker that just might help me crack down and actually get some of these projects finished!

 

(First, if you're not sure of what a bullet journal is, you can check them out here)

 

I thought it might be easier to understand what I'm talking about if I gave a full view of how I work my bujo...This is a two week spread. I list daily cleaning chores, appointments, rowing and running days, my weekly budget (which sadly gets neglected but one of my goals is to get that under control this year!), snail mail replies, and the week's Action Items--projects that need to be prioritized. Sometimes that works, other times maybe not so much...And of course, doodle and lettering space! Oh, and the week's menus. The left side is this current week and the right page is next week. I don't typically fill the whole week in ahead of time--you never know what can pop up at any given time and it's better to leave yourself some wiggle room. However, with this Focus challenge, I wanted to work in a daily log space to track some of the projects that seem to be falling between the cracks, so I've done that at the bottom of the right page:

Two week spread

The upcoming week

 

 

Daily Focus Log

Below is my monthly January spread--I'll pencil in daily cleaning tasks and appointments each week, then along the side I keep track of things that I'm working on, need to complete, and also projects I'd like to think about for the coming month:

I got the idea for a project breakdown sheet from the GetToWorkBook.com. This is a great planning system and a beautiful book but bullet journaling allows room to create these pages in my own way and so, viola:

My only problem seems to be remembering to incorporate these projects into my daily task lists. So, I'm hoping that's where the daily focus log will help bring about the accountability and eventually get these projects DONE!

 

And one final shot of the stash I just grabbed from the library this morning and will be working on for the next six weeks:

I'm most excited about the two Lee Hammond books, and Hillberry's Textures. The Basic Perspective book is for an upcoming project I'm pretty psyched about as well!

I think that catches us up. I am hoping to get another post in for the coming week--fingers crossed! In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the weekend, hopefully it's snowing where you are--I wish it was here...See you again soon!