I Compel Thee Nae More 2014-W36

Our second Bloggiversary is today, more or less... this Painterly Thoughts blog having started up on 9/9/2012.  Most weeks it's a labor of love, but you see the key word there is labor.  I feel compelled to keep the streak alive and so I have for two years running. Actually somewhat longer if you count the sister blog for Salon deWinchester which had a good consecutive posts thing going until I started this one.

But now enough is enough.  Not that I have any intention of halting this blog.  Just that from time to time if I decide to skip a week, so be it.  The earth will still rotate as expected and life will go on as if nothing happened.  Now that you know the blog will still appear nearly every week at its new time, you can sigh in relief or despair as you see fit.

In the spirit of fully freeing myself from feeling compelled to paint and blog every Saturday, I decided to blog — it is Bloggiversary, for Pete's sake — but not paint.  So I fished through my first sketchbook.  We saw an entry from it in the 2013-W33 posting.  I bought it in Winnipeg, probably in 2001, and took it with me to England while I worked there in 2002.  Amateur watercolor painting seems to be more of a thing there.  I remember trundling some stuff with me on a day trip to the seaside resort of LLandudno in Wales, where among other things I did a painting sketch of the Great Orme.  It's a somewhat impressive rocky promontory with a very impressive name.  Take that, Little Orme.  Which of course is nearby.

After some dabbles in England, I occasionally would take out my art supplies and admire them.  Even more rarely, I would get them wet and do something with them. From among those early dabblings and book lessons, I chose this page from November, 2003, to share.  I thought it was pretty nifty at the time and I still like both of the ancient tiny paintings on it.

In the intervening years, I've learned a lot about how to paint, and how to be a little less miserly with the art supplies.  Living larger, I must have done a couple hundred paintings since then, culminating in Bad Kitty III last week. And though he hasn't got much patina yet, I like looking at him too.

Thanks for your patronage and please keep coming back.  I may skip a week now and then, and I don't mind if you do the same.  Peace!