lillilah | Entries tagged with painting

I spent a lot of time working on getting ready to study Portuguese without a teacher. I tried Pimsleur, but I am too advanced for the part that is in European Portuguese. So, I'm not going to use it. Instead, I just have to keep plowing through podcasts, trying to get better at comprehension. It worked with French, eventually, so I'll keep at it. I'm going to see if speaking Portuguese to Claude.ai via the app on my phone works. I'm not comfortable with the idea of doing this, but I can go through the partner exercises in my textbook with it. It can't talk back to me, which is okay. Self-voicing with a computer voice that is using California English is so painful to listen to when it is trying to pronounce Portuguese.

The podcast deadline is looming, and I told a promoter that I would put two of their label's songs in the next episode, because they sound good together, and I've been meaning to get the first song they sent me into an episode for a while. However, the sound is quite right for anything I have. I did find a song by a Japanese band that I really like (and had permission for) that will fit. And finally, after a few hours of trying to find the right songs, I came up with two more from a couple of different labels that should work. I'm so glad that is finally moving forward.

I'm not going to get all my paintings done by this weekend, but I drew out a fairly good looking X-Wing for the Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader painting that I'm doing (the trench run from the first Star Wars movie). I would love to have gotten more done, but I don't want to push myself and end up even more stressed.

Oh!!!! We came up with a solution to the scooter/bike problem. Yesterday, I rode the scooter again, and it was a lot of fun. However, it definitely doesn't have enough power to get up the hills. So, I 100% will need a new one. And Joel's bike is _still_ not working (company sent a replacement part, which didn't fix the problem, so the bike will have to go back to Spain again). Joel is looking to buy another bike. If we buy another scooter for me, then we would have two scooters and two bikes, needing to sell one of each. However, the other thing I discovered with the scooter is that I will have to ride the breaks down any hill. One of the big reasons for the scooter was that it was supposed to have a speed limiter, which would mean that I didn't have to deal with that. If I am going to have to ride the breaks down all the hills, I might as well be on a bike. I can just ride it really slowly. If Joel buys a new bike and gets the old bike fixed (again), then I can ride the slightly smaller new bike for my one trip into town per week, and Joel can ride the old bike on that one day. The rest of the time, he can ride the new bike (which we think he will like more). Then, we would only need to get rid of the scooter, which we will need to get rid of anyway. Having two bikes in the yard is way less annoying than having a scooter in the living room. So, anyway, that is the plan.

We're trucking along here. Joel has another batch of boards being glued together on the floor downstairs and has mixed the paint for me (it requires a lot more mixing than latex), so now I'm going to paint the area behind the ledge. I finished a painting of a rose that I don't love but don't hate. It just didn't quite work out. Still, it is good enough, and I did a good job with the leaves and the background. I'm a bit anxious about the Star Wars painting that I need to work on next, but I don't have to deal with it today. And while it is complicated, it is still less complicated than what I had planned to do. That one had people, which I wasn't so sure about. The third painting needs a new background (but it will be just like the rose, so that should be okay) and then just to have the drawn sections filled in, so it should be like a coloring book at that point.

While talking to an AI this morning, I came up with a landscaper that should be able to handle both the trees in our yard and the building of raised beds. I think they could probably deal with fertilizing and giving me advice on the grape too. So, I just need to get myself together to do that. I hoped I would do it today, but between everything else I need to do and how anxious I am (and thus wasting time on games), I didn't get to putting it on my list. So, that will be dealt with another day. At least, I managed to get a bunch of stuff done for the podcast. Anyway, now, I'm off to paint.

I'm ignoring the obviously bad political thing that has happened (for future me - it is Trump). I made progress this morning on our D&D story (yay!) and made some progress on the very nice creepy forest scene that I'm working on. Unfortunately, I need to finish it tomorrow, as I'm going to be busy on Friday with a dentist appointment (although, I might be able to get home by a reasonable time and able to finish up some bits after dinner). I might have to not do any house painting Thursday (and definitely not Friday). We'll see.

Now, I'm off to paint the ledge above the bed (and the walls behind and one one end of it).

I have finished the downstairs wall by my desk. It isn't smooth, but it wasn't smooth originally either. However, it is now white and shouldn't drop bits of concrete and sand all over the floor all the time. It is surprisingly calming to not have it be such a mess. We'll be able to move my desk back over to where it belongs tomorrow. I'll be glad to have that back in place. I got the first coat of paint on about half of the upstairs wall with the windows. I'm hoping to finish the first coat on that side and then get the first coat up in the ledge area tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

I have two or three Portuguese classes left. I'm still really looking forward to being done with that. I also contacted the people who helped us get our visas here, and they said that the whole renewal system is a total disaster after the change to a new agency. However, I am supposed to email the new immigration agency (to prove that I'm trying to comply with regulations, not because they respond), so I'll do that soon. I also asked about getting an exemption and was told what the next step is for that.

I'm hoping to have enough time tomorrow (between all the rounds of wall painting) to have time to work on some card painting. Hopefully, that will work out.

I finished one of my paintings. I'm super happy with how the water turned out.

In other news, today was book organizing day for my November reading. I'm once again pissed at Everand for cutting me off. I'm looking to move away from them, since I feel like I might be able to read the books I want to read without them unexpectedly cutting off my access to books that I'm in the middle of reading. To that end, I got a paid library card from the Queens Public Library. I'm going to try to get my library card started up with my library in Eugene. We'll see if that will work. Anyway, I read 13 books in October and am super happy about the progress I made finding books that I enjoy. I've also moved much more toward getting through series. Which reminds me that there are a couple of books I should try to find....

Yesterday was pretty good. I enjoyed going into Lisbon and seeing my friends. Today, I'm having trouble focusing. I once again had my AI companion help me organize my tasks, but after helping with that, it reminded me (based on a note I put in the system) that if I am feeling extremely anxious, eating peanuts may help. It has been more than a week since my brain caught on fire. I feel like I should be over this, but no. So, while I dismissed the peanuts at first, I think that my current anxiety level indicates that I should eat them.

Here are the two paintings I did recently:
https://cara.app/post/5691e9e6-4a73-4553-b219-574114825671
https://cara.app/post/095f97dd-9f83-4b4a-8c11-dd4286fd4d8c

It is nice to have a day when I don't feel like there are a ton of things I have to get done. Also, I have found that the oranges from our tree that end up on the ground are plenty ripe to eat. So, I've been cutting them up and putting them in my salads.

I cut back on magnesium so that I can take 0.53g during the day and then again at night. (I realized that I was weighing one with the capsule and one without, which make it all the more ridiculous.) I think, though, that the lower dosage today has made me moody. Hopefully, I'll perk up tomorrow.

The fires in the north of Portugal are pretty bad, so the air quality is not all that. I think that is making my fussiness worse.

In good news, I found a file yesterday that had all the work I had done for the setting that I will use for my serial story. It was from about 20 years ago, so I remembered little of the details. Happily, I've been able to fill in a lot of the missing bits, which I am so happy about. Hopefully, I'll get a big chunk more of it done tomorrow.

I also worked more on one of my new paintings. It is of a guy standing in a field with a tree, looking out at the horizon. I felt, however, like the guy didn't really work in the field. But! If I put in an opening in the stone wall along the foreground side of the field and a path that the guy has walked on to the point where he is standing, a path that leads toward the edge of the image, I think it will all work. I don't really have the sense that "this pulls your eye", but I can guess that the various lines in the painting will move around in an interesting way when the path is there. So, we'll see.

I finally finished the painting!! I also managed to get two other paintings primed, and last night I drew sketches of them.

I've nearly finished the painting of the succulents. I just have a few leaves right at the center of a cluster and some touch-ups on half a dozen others. I think I can finish it tomorrow. I'm going to put a ladybug on it, but I'm not sure if that will get done tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll have time to prime the other two canvases tomorrow too.

I'm having a good time listening to "Riders of the Purple Sage", an old western novel.

And not much else. I contacted the company about neurofeedback but haven't heard anything, since it is the weekend. I finished sealing the kitchen flood. I added a bit to my story background database so that I could write notes about locations in the story. (The database has a place for locations and info about the locations but didn't have any place for story-specific notes.) Also, I've nearly caught up on my Portuguese flashcards. For a while, I was just working on the exercises in the Portuguese-learning app and not the flashcards to memorize everything. About 9 months ago, I decided that I needed to get to work on the flashcards and calculated that it would take until about October for me to catch up. It is almost October, and I have almost caught up. I basically have to do about 90 flashcards twice a day right now. I look forward to when I can focus a bit more on learning new things and slightly less time on Portuguese in general. Just a little less would be nice.

Did some work on the painting of the jacaranda flowers, although I only actually painted one flower. It will be all ready for flowers tomorrow, though. I did some weeding, which - as I've said before - is just so much easier when all the weeds are totally dry from the sun. Our yard is like 50% accessible now. The area with the old chicken coop is full of tall grass, so I need to pull that all up (which will probably involve a shovel to get all those clumps out). The part of the yard that come to a point like the bow of a ship is full of weeds, as usual. The other real problem area is the area along the wall to the field (as opposed the wall on the side of the street). There is ivy and pink jasmine growing all along the chainlink on top of that wall. Under the ivy is an oleander bush, I think, plus there is a ton of that awful spiky potato-family plant and the bell flower tree, which I've hacked about halfway down. After I get through with the rest of the grass, I might start pulling out the ivy and jasmine and making baskets until I've cut it back far enough so that it isn't up in the trees and so that I can get to the oleander to work on cutting that way back too. We don't need the ivy at all, but I wouldn't mind having the jasmine confined to part of the chainlink and the top of a little arbor with bench. For now, though, I need to sew some straps on my masks for travelling, as the masks I normally wear on transit are getting a bit old.

I finished my painting of the jungle. You can find it here:
https://cara.app/post/650b5c7b-3a1b-4558-acde-3d07d2e05e86

The colors are a bit brighter in the photo, and the underpainting is way less obvious in real life. Still, you get the idea.

The wound on my toe has dried out! Finally! I've been trying to keep it out of the shower, which helps, as well as separated from the toe next to it by a cloth at night, so it can breathe. I can't wait for all this stupid foot shenanigans to be done. There is a small, bruise-like lump in the middle of my other foot now too. It hurts, but nothing around it hurts. It could, I suppose, just be a bruise. I expect that it will eventually go away. * shrug *

In other news, I spent some time working on woodworking plans. Last night, Joel and I hashed everything out, and today, I wrote down what we need for the armoire, drafted plans for the dressing cabinet and a long cabinet that will hold the printer (and other stuff), and emailed a company that sells wood to get a price list. There is not much that saps my brain power like doing things that involve figuring out spacial relationships. Studying a language puts me to sleep instantly, but spacial relationships make me anxious and confused. However, I got through it. It also finally occurred to me that I can order a new sketch pad, instead of just stressing about how the one I use is running out of pages.

I'm tempted to get some really big sheets of paper for painting, but ChatGPT thinks that masonite is a better choice. My grandfather always painted on masonite. I don't like canvas, since I don't like the texture showing through. Of course, regardless of what I do, I should sand the surface of the gesso I put on after it dries. I don't love sanding. However, I think it would create a better texture. Well, maybe when I'm in Lisbon next Saturday, I can get some really really fine sandpaper. Or, I could order it from Amazon, which would doubtlessly give me a better selection. Oh! Amazon is definitely the right choice. I found a package that has some really really fine grit for polishing things like gemstones! The slightly less fine grit in the package will work just fine for what I'm doing. Even if I just do a couple of passes over the gesso, I think it will result in a much better surface. I still doubt that I can get a nice smooth sky after that, but maybe it is one of those situations where I need to go slowly and use less paint... or actually put in the acrylic retarder, so that it doesn't dry so fast. Hmmm.... Well, I'm not working on that tomorrow, but I'll keep it in mind for the next time I'm trying to paint something smooth. (Next time, I think, I'm going to be painting flowers, so less of an issue immediately.)

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