New paintings and regular art updates.
Quick portrait I did today at a craft group I go to. I took my sketchbook because I just wanted to practice drawing. I find I get a lot of tension in my arms when I try and draw or paint theses days. It’s because I shake so much with the Parkinsons disease but something takes over when I’m being artistic. But if I hold a sheet of music when I sing I can’t stop shaking. Weird.
Choir was hard tonight, we were somehow bad with our timing, a bit out of tune and spent 40 minutes going over one piece of a song. We all seemed a bit tired, and our section was singing the main tune (we generally sing the backing part). It didn’t help that were singing “to make you feel my love” by Bob Dylan, but some of us were singing the Adele version!
By the time we had finished we had warmed up to the rehearsal and sounded a lot better.
Being in a choir is great for your mental health and helps you socialise, you can find lots of local choirs in the UK, so why not try it out?
I went to choir practice tonight. It was with trepidation and I was very nervous, but I’m glad I went. Breathing in and out, stretching my lungs, concentrating on the words and the emotions of each song. Gradually I felt a bit more like myself. It was scary and upsetting to start off with but by the end of the session I had relaxed a bit.
The only problem was that when I got home with a friend man in high vi’s trousers was wandering in the middle of the road. He watched us as we got out of the car, so we stood outside and loudly discussed if “Tom” or “Pete” were still up. Pretending someone was already in the house. Then I looked at the man and said I would ring the police. He wandered off and my friend sat in her car for five minutes watching out for me. Anxiety is a bad thing.
In the church singing carols
Music rises up
To the vaulted ceiling
Every note with feeling
Ralantando, piano
Notes descend and lift
Practice make perfect
Not there yet, but harmonizing
Three weeks to go
To the show!
We had choir practice tonight. We started to learn a song ‘it’s getting better everyday’ we had learnt it a few years ago when we had sung in a play at the local theatre. I was thinking about the enjoyment of singing and I remembered that Elton John was extolling the virtues of being in a choir at Glastonbury this year.
We are not a big group but we harmonise well. We did a few sea shanties and started learning another one about going on holiday.
It was such a positive evening, I would recommend joining a choir or singing group if you want to get calm and improve your breathing too. We learn a capella and we are mainly unaccompanied, it’s really fun!
My mind was occupied by various things today. Mostly pain from Sciatica or something similar. I tried doing yoga in bed a few nights ago and pulled something in my lower back so I’ve been trying to rest it and it has got a little bit better. I did go to choir but wasn’t happy standing up to sing. Very annoying. Any art on the way? No just trying to delete some photos as my phone is 90% full!
Two seperate apps, Sketcher free and Autodesk. I don’t often draw with these, they have different tools and I’m not really up to speed with them. But you never learn if you don’t practice. Also if I don’t use my tablet it gets clogged up with updates….so here they are, a couple of practice pieces,
Well its sort of finished….digital drawing on wacom tablet- oh Im out of practice….Random found pink objects with a green background for contrast and beige speaker and table top to show up the pink better…
a few years ago I would have been able to do better than this.. you know what practice does? It makes you do things better. In my case I used to do digital drawings virtually every day. I knew what buttons to press, what brushes to choose. So now I have to learn again and im definitly going to watch some videos on using photoshop and get a later version, this was done in Photoshop7… my very old version, I just don’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee to use the newer versions….
This was something I did in a workshop a couple of years ago. We were taught by a lovely man from Egypt who showed us how to do some Arabic letters, we each uses a stick with a knib carved in the end. As when you write the alphabet as a child we practiced writing letters over and over again. Then we could do what we wanted so I wrote my name but decided to decorate it with flowers and cats. I used it for ages on a Web page. It’s good to find old things that gave you pleasure in the past. X
I was looking for a spare sketchbook today and these drawings fell out of one of my old ones from about 3 years ago? They were quick sketches in a life drawing exercise. We were all given pages ripped from an old paperback and some pastels. Then we drew the model quickly when he arrived. One was just using shadows, another was trying to draw a mirror image, and left handed, plus different poses. I’ve edited the pictures to prevent embarrassment.
We have been including text in my illustration course. I’m glad I found these. Given me new ideas!
X
Mallaband-Brown