My day today was going downhill fast, Reader. I started the weekend with a lot of optimism, but then sometimes things happen that shoot the wind right outta your sails, and that’s what happened today. You know the kinds of things, those things that have you wondering what the hell does any of it even matter, why is just living such a struggle, blah blah. I have no business complaining about anything, I’ve got it rather easy, yet that doesn’t stop me from the Woe-is-Me’s. Sometimes they just arrive unannounced and no matter if you tell them to take a hike, they sit down on the couch and settle in for a while.
I hate this kind of unexpected company, except my dirty floors don’t matter to them. But they are exactly what’s preventing me from getting rid of those dirty floors.
It was quickly apparent by mid-day that I wasn’t accomplishing anything productive. While I was in my office feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of Things I HAVE To Do, I spied some painting canvas I bought almost a year ago, and decided Fuck it ALL, I’m going to sit on my deck and paint a motherfucking picture.
Now, I am an awfully amazing talented painter – with an emphasis on the awful. I’m also an award winning motherfucking awful artist, as evidenced below:
Most Organic Looking painting award, so suck on that, naysayers. Before you get too judgey, the owl was supposed to look all funky like that according to our instruction sheet which I thought I’d saved to SHOW YOU how close to awesome it really is, but somehow I can’t find that now. No matters, you can see the awful awesomeness wif your own eyes.
The Bosses of Painting Day killed some of my creativity by making us hold them for photos before I was finished and my paint was still wet. So now I’ve got a nice little drippy owl, which frankly galls the artist in my soul. We only had two hours to paint our masterpieces, it was a sip & paint work team building event, which is frankly how I like all my corporate team building events : drinking and alone with my art. My piece is still missing a lot of details due to the time constraints, I didn’t have time to flesh in all the details which would have really made this orange-slice eye’d owl a showstopper.
But I worked with the time I had and really enjoyed myself.
So when I finally recognized that today wasn’t going to go to plan with Doing Productive Things, like I said, I decided to unleash my badass artist self.
Tomorrow I will be sad I didn’t focus on the floors instead.
I got all set up on the deck, squirted my paints and tried to loosen up these awful, horrible little paintbrushes that came with the paint kit. and took a damn stab at it.
You guys. I think I’m supposed to enjoy the process more than I did.
I think I like watercolors better than oils. I like to just mash all my colors together. I have zero knowledge of how oils even work, or what I’m actually supposed to do to get them to turn out nicely.
Oils had a lot of waiting time. And then try some new colors. And then my flowers became big circle blobs and my hand got some paint on the bottom of the canvas that i then smeared to look ‘intentional’ and I hated that a lot, and my flower box looks like a giant black blob and well, the end story is, it just made me frustrated and I started intentionally making the flowers look worse so I can justify throwing it right in the outside garbage can and those are some hours I’m not going to get back.
I think oils are supposed to be something you dabble in, and then come back to, and it’s a whole “journey” and I wasn’t in the mood for a trip today, I just wanted to paint like a mad woman and have something to show for it at the end.
This was not the thing I wanted to show for it at the end. And it’s not even at the end, because wow, it’s still in need of a lot of something.
Regrets, yep, I’ve got a few. Spending part of my day painting a piece of crap instead of painting my door frame is one of them.
Relax = Fail. But I’m still an award-winning artist, mo’fucks.