Coughing Up Creativity

This has been a difficult week. I have bronchitis and a sinus infection, and I can say with all honesty and no melodrama that I have never been so sick in my life! I'm finally on the mend, but I still have a hard time breathing deeply. And my medicine makes me feel like I've been on a bit of a bender. Which would be cool if I were still on summer vacation...and still eighteen!

So it's been hard to do tons of creative endeavors. I didn't even set goals this week, as I knew that I may not meet all or any of them. I decided to just see what happened and worry about getting better over getting creative.

I found, though, that being an invalid gave me the chance to just sit and create, though. So it kind of worked in my favor.

The big thing that I have been working on is making book page charms for my Etsy site. I haven't posted anything for sale there in over a year. I used to sell earrings that I made, but I found that I made more sales to friends and family, so I took down all my listings. Now, however, I'm getting back in the game. I also decided to list everything at low prices. With the economy, people don't have the money to throw around. And I know that I sometimes feel a pang when I see something I really want but don't feel that I can spend the money on it. I wanted to price the charms so that people can skip the pang and feel the joy of being able to purchase.

I also had the urge the other night to paint. I have an old oil painting kit (Bob Ross, baby!), and I just really wanted to pull it out of the coal bin and see if the paints were any good. I had started a piece a while ago by covering a canvas board with pages from a book, but I had set it aside because I didn't like it. I decided to add paint to it and just see what happened. I started with a black gesso, and withing moments of the first brush stroke, my three-year-old was asking to help. I gave him a small brush and we went to town! We coated the whole canvas with the sheer, black gesso. Then we started adding color. I let him pick each color and let him tell me where to put them. It was messy so much fun! We layered gobs of paint on. I stipled it around with my brush. He painted "roads that look like Mousachusetts" with his. At the end, I scrapped off paint with my painter's knife and here's what we ended up with:

Poor quality since it's from my iPhone, but you get the idea...

The one project I did plan to do almost didn't happen. Laura and I have started doing iPhoneography missions each week. This week's mission was to "Minimize the horizon." I wracked my brain...and then my body was wracked with coughs, so it started to feel like this mission just wasn't going to happen. And to top it off, I just couldn't think of how to even meet this mission! I started with the idea of framing something in the foreground so that the horizon just faded behind it. A fledgling grasshopper on my front porch provided my original inspiration:

I really, really like this shot...but it didn't fit the mission well enough. I decided that this would be my Plan B in case I didn't get a chance to get any other shots. And with the bronchitis, I didn't know that I would get any other chances.

But then Hubby and the little guy saved the day! He needed to run to Lowe's and had mentioned that he wanted to go to the Chinese buffet at the mall. I had planned to loaf about the house in my jammies, but as soon as the little guy heard the word "Chinese", he was all in! I threw on some clothes and off we went. Along the way, I decided to try to capture some horizon shots for the mission:

Ultimately, though, I chose the next one to be the official shot of this mission:









Horizon, Minimized

I'm so excited to see Laura's post and see the results of her mission! I'm sure they're going to be wonderful! And I'm just as excited to see the mission for this week! I purposely avoided looking at her page until I finished this post, but now I'm off to see what she's created and what we can look forward to for the coming week!

Creative wishes and germ-free hugs!!