the in-between times

I remember long-ago lazy days of summer stretching endlessly ahead of me... walks in the forest, days at the lake, jumping waves, collecting the shells of fresh-water snails, picnics at the Rock Pile

the summer days still seem endless but not so much in the lazy, pleasant ways of used to be

summers now tend to be the time for the large-scale outside maintenance chores that take up big chunks of time  though this year it hasn't been as bad as usual

this year its only the fence that needs fixing and staining and though I had a brief foray into it in May its only now that the work is in full swing

which means creative time is minimal... which means its hard to dig into anything that requires any kind of regular attention or large blocks of time... which means I get agitated

sooo... determined to be able to do something creative as and when a bit of time presents itself  I sat down a couple of weeks ago and did a quick doodle, expanding on an idea I tried a few years ago of adding details to a drawing of the clay cliffs in Whitehorse using writing for some of the furrows

I couldn't find that drawing so grabbed a piece of paper that had been smudged with charcoal and had a play at using asemic writing to depict hills in a landscape - not trying for anything specific rather, just an attempt to see if I could approximate what I was envisioning

this was literally a 3 1/2 minute effort,  just to see how the marks could work in a landscape and I came away thinking it was somewhat promising so I got out a couple of books I have on expressive calligraphy and had a flip through them

and then a video or two...

and now the worktable is laid with watercolour and ink, brushes and pens and whenever I have a bit of time between fence panels I can grab a tool and make a few marks

and in the way of things, now that I'm thinking about marks and such my niece and I found some interesting pieces of bark whilst on a walk last week... large chunks had fallen off a dying tree and we noticed interesting marks on this one

made by termites, it looks to me like a map of their munching

and then we saw a few other examples of nature's textures

 I remembered this image from the Spring... the disrupted reflection of branches on the water was very intriguing though admittedly, I didn't notice that until looking at the image on my laptop

so... I made a duplicate, cropped it and added a filter called "Silvertone"

lots of possibilities for calligraphic play here, as and when...

and in between fence panels