squwetchy Week four of my #watercolour class and we dug into some interesting new techniques for this elaborate people flower. Some lifting and some layered/blending washes had some interesting optical effects related to what goes the illusion of transparency on the petals. I have been pushing in the boundaries of my backgrounds for all the pieces I’ve completed for this class …which was above and beyond to the assignment, and just something I’d seen done online. The instructor really likes it tho and has been ribbing me and calling it The Brad Technique and some of my fellow students have started to imitate it.

8r4d Half May and I’m officially fifteen days down on my #running streak. This evening we clashed our #runcrew with #runclub and raced the threatening rain with a speedy right klicks. Somehow I managed yet another day even though my legs are feeling the daily pound of the asphalt. That said, we broke off and ran a bit of parallel trail for kicks.

8r4d I spent a lot of the winter driving to various #cafe in the neighbourhood looking for a distraction-lite place to write and work. Then as the #spring arrived I switched to walking, trudging along the paths to my local haunts to find the same gaming-console-free no-tv nothing-to-clean space to get some more writing done. This morning I realized that with the nice weather and warmer mornings a #bike ride would substitute. So maybe I’ll spend my summer #cycling to write? As long as I can find a place to lock up. Starbucks was acutely lacking in bike racks this morning so I’m at Waves instead. #coffee

8r4d Day fourteen of my streak and on the last day of my second week of #running I opted to tackle the hot-ish #spring temps with some more mileage on my summer gauntlet project. I really need to be more methodical about my routes to be honest because I seem to recall that last time I tried this I was cleaning up the neighbourhoods with a lot less overlapping of stuff I’d already run. Or maybe I’m just idealizing my memories.

8r4d With only about 10 days until our year end concert our #orchestra is in full gear for practice. The result is that it’s Tuesday morning and I’m on the north side of town to meet for a morning sectional practice having barely recovered from our practice last night which ended almost exactly 12 hours ago. And it’s such a beautiful sunny #spring day too.

8r4d Monday afternoon the smoke has cleared and JB and Sadie needed a run, so I clocked day 13 of my #running streak.

8r4d According to the sacred violinist’s lore one must change one’s strings with care and regularity. Prolific players may need to change their strings every six to nine months. Moderate players like me should change their strings every twelve to eighteen months. Occasional players may wish to only replace strings every couple years or as required, because it’s not cheap nor trivial either. I last replaced my strings about five years ago… or in a timeframe clearly in breach of the sacred advice of internet #violin experts. Probably should have got on that sooner, huh?

8r4d Another day, another sky full of #firesmoke but RM messaged mid-afternoon and figured we were sitting at about the clearest it was gonna be for a day or so and would I like to get my daily #running done? So I drove to the south side and we tried out a 9k from the starbucks in the smoky air with some thunder cracking off just outside the city. Some trails, some suburbs, some asphalt, some sun…all good.

squwetchy I did some unplanned meditative painting last night before bed. Just put on an audiobook, watered down some blue paint, and starting with a wash and some selective lifting just let my imagination go wild. I have been a little bit fascinated with the idea of ethereal forests emerging from the soft wet-on-wet blur of layering washes of tree silhouettes and this is a good example of how that can blossom into something interesting by simply adding carefully layered tree textures over and over into a still-damp paper. The trees sort of soften into each other as you work and then you go back over them to build up colour value later by layer. I was just mucking around here mostly but even as I worked I kind of regretted not going about it in a more planned way because the result was actually materializing for me. Sadly, my iphone is a little weak in photographing such nuance and it keeps trying to amplify the textures and grain of the paper, inflating the contrast that is not there as strongly when you are looking at this in real life. There photo does not do it justice.

squwetchy Oh sure, you say, after all those pretty flower pictures now you go and post some depressing #dystopian #watercolour scene from a Fallout game or something, but see the thing is this was inspired, colours and all, by a photograph I took this morning of the creek valley filtered through the haze of all that forest #firesmoke, so… put that in your pipe and… well.

8r4d I was kinda hopeful that I would need my #firesmoke hashtag for a few weeks yet, but yet again the pall of burning forests in the north squashed my relatively wee & insignificant #running plans. I was all set to crank out a 12-15k long run this morning (because of scheduling issues for tomorrow) but woke up to a haze and all sorts of cancelled races. I scaled back and just added to my gauntlet in north riverbend instead of a longer adventure.

pixelazy The only filter I used on these plum tree blossoms was the smoke of a million burning dreams. #firesmoke