Everyone was asking me why I wasn’t drawing pictures of Amy, so I thought I’d prepare a little surprise for our 11th wedding anniversary. I started with one of us together and then ones with Amy and one of her friends. I then sent these digitally to her friends and asked them all to send them back to Amy digitally today. It was fun to plan all this and it got me a lot of practice with sketching.
Shaun and AmyAmy and JessicaFern and AmyMay and AmyAmy and MueyAmy and GraceBillie and AmyMai and AmyAmy and Bookie
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for the TV in our hotel room last night. The porter switched it on when bringing in our bags and I thought it was weird to turn on the TV. As I was waiting for Amy I switched channels by total coincidence they had the ABC Channel and the Swans game was being shown live. I managed to watch the first half before we had to go out for dinner.
At my school I made friends with four university students doing their internships here. They are young and vibrant people and have a youthful idealism that I still seem possess, so it was easy for me to be drawn to them.
Today is their last day with us (unless they decide to stay here and work on the pitiful wages they would receive) and I made them each a special card. Unfortunately I forget to take a picture of each card but the front features the sketches attached. None of them are perfect but they should be recognisable to themselves I hope!
I really enjoyed the process of putting the cards together and having to come up with ideas for me, somewhat inspired by Austin Kleon’s artistic trials.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for all the movies I downloaded over the years. I can watch almost anything that I ever found of interest whenever I want. I can remember when the only option was to wait for the Friday night special of the Saturday horror double bills. That made movies more special but now I can find movies that I choose from anywhere in the world.
I usually do my drawings at House where the coffee is particularly addictive. I can taste it now – almost 6 hours since my last cup. In the mornings, I can’t wait to get there and take that first sip.
Anyway, Mei, who is a pretty lady who works there has seen me drawing every day and today she sidled up to me and in her best English, her vocabulary quite limited, asked if I could draw a picture of her. At first, I was a little surprised and then a little delighted – my first commission! I told her though, that she mustn’t be upset if she doesn’t like what I produce!
Subsequently, she added me in LINE and sent me a picture for me to use – I’m only at the stage of copying from pictures.
Doing all these face drawings has been an interesting challenge and I’m kinda excited to know that I will move onto other things to draw in the future and try to improve my skills all round.
I had another good online teaching lesson and I’m at home alone as Amy has gone with Takky for the weekend for a housewarming event. With no one else around I feel a lack of tension. I don’t need to think about any verbal communication unless I want to tell the cats something. Either Xbox, YouTube or comics in bed beckon.
Tomorrow I’ll be up at a reasonable time to take Dylan up to a hill tribe village for a morning walk. Good exercise.
I’ve been sketching. Slowly improving I think. Testing myself with faces and fingers…..ugh! These are all taken from pictures of my students (school and university). It’s a fun challenge.
Every raw material at hand Remember all the things you said you’d do?
Learn How by Mission of Burma
12th Mar 2023 – I haven’t done much sketching since this post but I still carry a small notebook with me just in case I get the urge. I enjoyed the process, but not so much the results. I console myself in the fact that I was trying things and still seeking inspiration anywhere I could. I seem to have settled on writing here as my main outlet for creativity but I should start adding some variety again.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for the students in M1/9 – some of them are capable of carrying out complex conversations and able to discuss thoughts and feelings clearly. Sometimes I can feel that my effort to help teach them has been worthwhile.
We all have to start somewhere. I was always interested in art at school because it appealed to the part of my brain that could utilise imagination rather than drier subjects that required adherence to some sort of order. Weirdly I did well enough in those subjects though. Anyway, art just felt like the easy pass.
Of course, painting wine bottles and flowers didn’t really appeal and I wasn’t mature enough or my imagination broad enough to conjure anything worthwhile. I think I actually ended up doing more artistic things at home more than in class. Two pieces particularly stick in my mind and I don’t recall doing either at school. My most prominent memory of my three years of art class was finishing off a bottle of vodka and leaving the bottle in the classroom for other people to draw in the future. That was first year of high school – we were 13 years old. 1980 or 1981.
Like the other times I’ve had to draw on my education, such as Maths and English tests when applying to University, I’ve been able to dig deep into my memory and apply myself somehow. So, now I’m sketching when I have the chance and I’m digging into those art lessons I honestly don’t remember anything. What I learned about perspective I got when studying photography back about 12 years ago and watching YouTube videos about pavement artists and force perspectives.
Now, what I really learned, and learned from punk rock and my mother, is about just doing it. Getting on and doing it. When I look at these sketches again I can see the imperfections, the incorrect spacing etc. But when I look with kindness I think, wow, that’s pretty good (for me!).
Rather than set my expectation too high and demand perfection or failure, I choose the middle ground. Do it, finish, move on.
These sketches are from my morning coffee spot, House. My enjoyment with these was due to the very strong perspective of all the straight lines in the room.
First sketch
After making each drawing I gave them to Guey, the owner, and, if working from a photo I took, deleted the photo so all I end up with is a digital file of my sketch. I will do the sketch within 30 minutes, not as a rule but more that I have found the feel and if I went any further I would be getting down into detail that would take it beyond a sketch. Through these 3 sketches (over 3 or 4 days) I could feel improvement each time and they made me really happy and gave me a small sense of achievement.
Second sketch
When I find some more free time and inspiration I will do more but I think I’m done with House now, though they have a cute dog and a challenging garden that would be fun to draw. Hmm….ok – tomorrow!
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful that I have been able to continue this gratitude journal app every day for more than a year now. I will switch to writing in a diary from now. I am so happy and grateful for the unusual big rain today and the fact that our roof holes that I plugged have held up fairly well – just a few leaks. Our plants will be happy for some water.
The best thing that happened today was being able to read whilst eating my lunch. I was late to eat so there was no one else around.
Other little nice things included many students being smiley and happy with me and trying to communicate as much as they could.
There’s a big storm hanging around today and there’s been a lot of rain. It’s funny – the dull drabness of the sky reminds me of England. Here it is a nice interlude to sunny warm days. In England, it would feel much more oppressive as those days would last for weeks on end.
We had a 4-day holiday over the new year. For 2021 I have made a half-hearted resolution to play more video games! Last year I rarely played anything at all. In fact, I have many things I could, can and will do but I thought it was amusing to make a resolution often seen as negative.
So for much of this 4-day holiday, I gave myself a backache by playing new games on my old Xbox One.
An exception to this was the evening of the 31st December where Amy and I enjoyed a spicy hot pot with the last packet of sauce my friend Ellen delivered from China last year (or the year before….when was it!?). We also sipped on yoghurt-flavoured shoju but Amy gave up around 11pm. We had watched the Sydney Harbour fireworks at 8pm and that is when Amy considers the new year to have actually started for us, her heart still being there. I carried on building cities and shooting monsters and was up again pretty early the following morning.
On the Saturday a few of Amy’s friends and I got together at a cafe on the way to Mae Sai. It was busy there but we all ate our fill and lazed around, Amy knocking back a few Heineken’s and getting a little louder as she likes to do.
We decided to visit her old friend from Sydney who has a cactus farm nearby and he kindly gave us a couple for Amy’s collection.
We had to stop at a shop on the way home so that Amy could grab another beer and she organized herself to head on into the city for more food and alcohol! My sweetheart the drunk!
I left her to it but she came back much earlier than I expected, mentioning about some of her friends who insist that good luck only comes from going to the temple – something that particularly rubs Amy the wrong way. Amy believes in herself and all good and bad comes from within. Thai people are still very superstitious and like to put blame and benefit on things outside their control. Obviously, I agree with Amy’s point of view but I don’t let other people’s ideas like this rub me the wrong way, though I also don’t have to listen to them complain about their lives either!
Before this holiday I thought I’d like to do something artistic again and started off with sketching. I have more ideas for continuing this than I have time currently available – it could be a battle between sketching or video games. I hope to balance this effectively. So, I was quite happy and proud of my first sketch – just looking up from my little floor table where I was working.
Brain dump
Post-yoga workout, meditate. Thoughts focus on relationships at school and people’s personalities. Stop comparing, you are you and you are fine – you don’t have to be like George or Dylan or anyone. Being yourself is fine.
Tigger cries in the morning. My middle back aches, work on core. 10 Burpee’s was tough! Getting up was tough.
Little Kim sleeps next to my butt. So much time – enjoy it – use it. Feel good. Feel strong.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for my body to struggle through doing 10 burpees this morning. It was slow going but I made it. I must carry on.
The best thing that happened today was to watch a student’s face look happy when knowing that they had learned and remembered how to say a word correctly. This always makes me happy.
1994ever 