Tag Archives: doodles

Backfilling the Calendar

I love sketching little doodles from life as I do them. In the summer, however, I barely get a chance to note what is going on much less doodle about it.

I gave myself an hour this afternoon to backfill the calendar with some doodles.

How do I know these are my favorite watercolor pencil colors? They are stubby compared to all the others. The shortest? Orange. I never would have thought orange would be it…not actually my favorite color.

A Dropper in My Ink Bottle

A bottle of Sennelier Abstract acrylic ink arrived in a SketchBox. Other bottles of ink have arrived in the past with their usual caps. Remove the cap, dip your pen (stick, finger, whatever) and off you go.

This bottle arrived with a dropper, and I was a bit put off by it. A dropper suggests I should set aside a separate container exclusively for the use of a good quantity of this ink instead of conveniently using just the amount I wish to use directly from the bottle.

That would mean devoting yet another object to a purpose when I’m trying to restrain the introduction of more objects into my world. I have plenty thanks.

I set it aside.

You see my reluctance to use it was not due to the color of the ink because I was looking forward to using this blue. It was not really the dropper either.

My reluctance was to change.

I’m actually quite open to change, and anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I have changed quite a bit recently.

Adaptation to change takes time and is a creative process when done well. There are plenty of changes we have to adapt to quickly in the fast-paced environment that seems to have established itself as a norm.

Back to the dropper.

My mind reframed itself in its own time and allowed me to use the dropper. The dropper was the tool, not the problem.

My mind had been inflexible regarding a single, simple, salient point. The most obvious thing to the audience reading this was to use the dropper. That was not the first thing that came to my mind because my mind had been conditioned to approach capped ink bottles with a dip pen. There had not been a conscious effort to train my mind, just the prevalence of ink bottles with plain caps.

This change was of no consequence at all, and it was so inconsequential that I could set it aside for my brain to mull over on its own time. After all of that, I came to the obvious conclusion.

How much trauma is visited on my brain with the speed of change in every other facet of my life? How does that build inflexibility into my reasoning mind?

So I used the dropper.

It is a really lovely blue. This Rorschach hung out in my altered book for a couple of weeks, and then 60 Minutes had an article about UFOs…I don’t recall the acronym at the moment. But my mind went to aliens. Be honest yours did too.

Whether they are terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, what I know is the U.S. government claims not to know. That will be preying on my mind.

I think I’ll focus on the little things for a bit.