30 drawings in 30 days - first 10 drawings

#1/30 - Municipio - Pescina, Italy

#2/30 - Various plants from the garden - Pescina, Italy

#3/30 - Pescina (old town), Italy

#4-5-6/30 - Various subjects - Catanzaro Lido, Italy

#7/30 - La Tonnina - Catanzaro Lido, Italy
#8/30 - Pineta - Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy

#9/30 - Strada per Pescina, Italy (from photo)

#10/30 - Colline sopra Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy

And the first 10 drawings are done, almost as planned! I have been using my Moleskine watercolour notebook (21 x 13cm) as I'm planning to complete all the sketchbooks I have lying around the house by the end of the year. I have used different page layouts, so far: portrait, landscape, landscape with 4 horizontal inserts and landscape with 3 vertical inserts.
The first batch contains different type of sketches, some of them were done on the spot, some others were done using photos I had taken with my phone. I managed to do one drawing a day, except for drawings number 4, 5 and 6 that were done on the same day...you can tell by the size of the drawings and the lack of details.....

Note: In the UK the hash # isn't printed on the Apple Mac computer keyboard, so just press "alt"+3.

This week in pictures

So like everyone else on the blog sphere, from time to time I will be sharing a summary of my life through pictures. I take most of my pictures using my phone, it's always with me and it doesn't require much effort. The only phone app I sometime use is Instagram. I do love Instagram and its filters, the vintage feel is quite cool and you can easily turn uninteresting pictures in more appealing ones. My Instagram pictures are posted on twitter as soon as I take them, I usually give it some thoughts before shooting, trying to catch more interesting subjects. The phone camera is for everything else, including videos, and the pics stay on my phone until needed.

This week I'm sharing both Instagram and phone photos.

The Instagram topic for this week is the beach! We are having an unbearable heat wave and spending most of the day at the sea.

The rest of the time is spent having fun watching Miss O doing new things...like standing up holding on furniture and trying to climb out of her cot...so much fun!

The photo layout has been edited using a free iPhone app called "photosplit"....it does what I need and it's easy to use. Shame about the app tag on the final layout.

Back to the roots

It has been a while since I shared my thoughts on here. Although my head has been busy with ideas, projects and various topics I seemed to never find the right time to write about it. It's the lazy part of me that prevailed over the past few months (two, three?? Has it been that long?). Maybe, or it's just that all those things didn't excite me enough to find the time to actually do them/write about them. So after two days of ups and downs, lots of reading and lots of talking to G, I figure out that sometimes you need to go back to what made you start in the first place. It all begun (or better said resurfaced) back in 2005, about a year after moving to London when I enrolled in an evening art class at the local education centre. My childhood memories resurfaced and I rediscovered that sensation of fulfilment that I had lost along the way. Back then it was just a way of relaxing the brain from my daily job, but it soon became a necessity, something I would miss if I wasn't doing it. And after 7 years it's still the same...when I'm not painting or drawing I'm thinking about it. So here it comes, a new challenge for the rest of the summer: 30 drawings in 30 days! There are plenty of groups around the blog world that are taking up similar challenges; I might join some of them, just in case my motivation runs low along the way. But I will be doing it just for me, to make sure I do find the time every day to escape into my personal space if only just for a few minutes. Depending on the time available, I'm aiming to post three batches of ten drawings, hopefully with some accompanying text. And all starts today!

A mini book for Miss O

 

Exactly one year ago we announced to our families and friends that we were pregnant. It was a magic  nine-month wait, with lots of ups and downs, joy and tears, excitement and fear (a lot of fear!). But it was all truly forgotten by the moment Miss O was born; there was no time to even think about how life was before. And so I'm glad I did have the time to put together a little book documenting how we spent the nine months before, what we did and how we prepared ourself to embrace her to our world from the moment we found out we were expecting. 

The idea of the mini book came reading elise blaha's blog (the mini books guru!); I put it together using a variety of plain and pattern paper, cut to 4"x6" and bounded using two 25mm rings. The front cover was made using a letterpress machine (I talked about it here) and the title, well, it speaks for itself...we did think about her for nine months (if not before!).

I managed to squeeze nine months in about 50 sheets, above are a selection of random pages from the book.

It will be our 'how we were before you were born' memory and a nice little gift for Miss O when she will be old enough to appreciate it.