An elephant that needs a bit of tweaking

I didn't notice that this elephant's leg needed some tweaking until after I put my paint away. I think the next time I take my paints out, I'll try to fix it. In the meantime, I have been having fun playing with drawing pencils. As someone that stopped using drawing pencils a couple of year ago, in favor of mechanical pencils limited to B and 2B graphite, it' fun to play with the higher B's again. In case you're wondering about what I mean, the higher the number in the B range, the softer the graphite. The softer the graphite, the darker the marks you can make. Moving to the mechanical pencils all started with an on-line portrait "class" I was taking a couple of year ago. The instructor was teaching us a specific technique and wanted us to use mechanical pencils. It was all about laying down layers slowly and building up values gradually. As much as I learned in the process by working slowly and carefully, I feel ready to get my hands smudgy again. I should be posting something done with dark, dusky values soon. I'm sure you're way excited about that fact.

I worked today and am so glad to be home on my couch right now. It's not like it was overly busy (in fact, it was quite mellow), but there were very few workers there, and technology kept failing. And of the few workers that were there, there weren't very many that were skillful. I know, I know--meow, catty. Anyway, before I started this blog post, I was on this same couch watching something via "watch instantly" netflix when my spyware software decided to do a scan and caused it all to freeze. I'm going to attempt to watch again when I'm done here.

Tomorrow, as it is my first of two days off, I have decided that I'm going to continue with the great cleaning project of 2010. I plan on finishing the closet and possibly scrubbing the floor. We'll see what happens. Hope everyone is having a pleasant Saturday evening.

If you see a lot of missing "s's", it's not my fault. I'm having issues with my "s" key as well as the shift key on the left hand side of the keyboard. I think I need to try to clean the keyboard. There are probably crumbs under some of the keys. It really annoys me because I like to write fast and furious and this slows me down.

Edited to add that I spent some time in the used book room at the library looking for some books to rip apart. I know, I know, destroying books is a travesty. But, I recently was looking at a book that had pictures of paintings that were done on book covers. Hey, and I'm poor. One book for 50 cents can provide surfaces for two paintings. And I didn't just grab random books. I looked for books that I didn't think would be likely to enrich anybody's life. Yes, I know--who do I think I am? The book judge? Oh well... I guess I am.