Art Course progress, and sinking with stressors all around....

I signed up to an online art course last month.
It's run by Suzi-Blu, the author of this book-

The course I'm on teaches you to draw a stylized portrait, first in pencil, then building up to mixed media on wood. Click here for more info on this course.

Here is my second attempt at a basic face, using a measuring system, e.g., an inch wide for each eye, an inch in between, then a inch down the middle to the end of the nose, and so on.

There has been teaching on shading, and cross-hatching as a way of building up shadow value.
This picture was done with just a 2H pencil so that you have to build up the shadow gradually.
This is interesting to me as previously I would have used several pencils and would have used the softer, darker ones for shadow, like 2B or 3B at least. I have never been taught shading and cross-hatching this way.

In the lesson, she took the picture at this stage and stuck it into her journal to return to at a late date. I can't do that because the journal I bought, the one recommended, is too small ;) so I have glued this to a piece of wood and have started to colour it with Prismacolor pencil and acrylics.
This evening I found out all my white acrylic is dried up though, so I have stopped there.


I'll try to steer to the art shop when I am in town with mum tomorrow, where no doubt she will be noisily horrified at the price of a tube of white paint.

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Meanwhile tonight I am very low............
Mum was panicky today about the noises she is hearing. The doc said it may be tinnitus, but she says it is very loud. We don't know if it's tinnitus associated with her hearing aids/ the mini strokes she had/ stress or whether it's a return of hallucinations to do with the vascular dementia.

I found a page on the internet about tinnitus and got her to sit with me and we read it together. Then I printed it out for her. She said she felt a bit better afterwards, having talked. But I felt drained as she had been so upset and talking about losing her mind so I had to calm her down and reassure her over and over....

Then, because it was getting a bit cold outside, mum went into the garden and pulled Scooter out of his tent and carried him indoors. I told her not to do this, but she said he was cold. The disturbance and the being carried (he hates it) caused him to have a funny turn, wobbly, twitchy and 'not quite there' again, a tiny seizure or the echo of one. Any sort of stress seems to be the trigger now. I won't even hoover unless he's out of the house.

After a stress and worry-filled evening my own mood sank. I am sipping brandy to settle my head. I tried my back-up pills but they had no effect.

Tearful now, and empty, and can't believe how uninterested I am in the art course. I hope it doesn't become another thing that ends up dropped. But this empty feeling of......nothing, and then I thought, even if I succeed, what will it do but give me a pile of pictures to clutter up another bit of this house and collect dust...... suspect a lot of this is hormones ;}

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Love, tea &cake,  
Helena