What Goes Around…

So you probably heard about the remarkable wind storm in the region that hit last Wednesday night. It was quite the storm indeed. I was out in it almost at its peak, and so was reminded of just how devastating concentrated gusts of wind can be, even for a short while. Strangely, while houses on several neighbouring streets had lost electricity, and even some on my street, I’d managed to not have any extended electricity outage (although I think something did take place in that regard while I was sleeping). Several friends and colleagues had no electricity for days after, so I’ve been wondering what I did to dodge that bullet.

Well, as though not to leave me out, last night I came home to find that it was my turn to have a disruption, although it was rather an odd one… some systems in the house had electricity, and some did not… The few things that did were some lights that came on about 1/4 the brightness they normally would. Various other systems were unable to deal with this sort of meagre supply and either were complaining or just refusing to operate. Strange.

Anyway, it made me glad that I had gone out, since I’d have been all frustrated had I intended to do a lot of work indoors. I’d gone out to sit in a studio and do a bit of drawing from a live model, for practice. It has been a while since I’ve been to a “drop in and draw”, and it shows a lot in my drawing. I’ve slowed down quite a bit and my lines are somewhat clunky. One of the best of the bunch I did is above left. It took about 25 minutes, and I ran out of time before I finished all the work on capturing and placing the shade values. I lost time since I was fiddling a lot with getting outline lines and overall measurements correct. On the other hand, it’s not too much of a disaster to look at, so I’m not displeased with it entirely. As you may have noticed from recent posts (see e.g. here, here, and here), I’ve been drawing a lot on The Project recently, completing the pencilling on a couple of pages I’m working up, but that’s drawing from my head, which is a different skill from drawing something in front of me in a fixed time (although the two help each other) and so it was good to knock the rust off some of those parts of my toolbox.

-cvj