Happy Holidays Everyone. :}

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. 

Compared to last year it was really pleasant.

This was a first but I hosted Thanksgiving at my house. Even cooked the turkey.

For once it wasn't burnt. Nothing at all. Even though it was just my dad over. Better than 

spending it alone like I did last year.

My dad burns everything he cooks. He cooks worse than a bachelor. 

Only thing he can cook better than I can is the family recipe of shrimp and chicken salad. One time he did burn the chicken and the building leader had to get involved. >___> And he lived on the other side of the building. Like 3 stairwells apart horizontally. 

Today I harvested cherry tomatoes from my plant which is over 12 feet. 

Just hanging out in my living room. 

Yay! I have enough to share.

They are pretty sweet even though it has lived indoors for most of its life.

I even have more green ones growing too. 

Haters be like you can't grow anything indoors....Pssh please. 

Ugh I got attacked by spider mites. Didn't have time to

deal with the infestation. But now that I do. Be prepared

their ****** hours are numbered. 

Its not much but way more than last time. Last harvest I only got 

four. Guess it represented one each for every person I wanted to give tomatoes to.

One of the habits I thought I would grow of and I tried and it doesn't matter and don't care anymore about this, one of my quirks with sketching in sketchbooks since I was 12 was never drawing page by page. Never in chronological order.  I flip through the pages randomly, find a blank page and sketch or scribble a random idea my imagination came up with. When I feel the book the book is full or I had enough of that book is when I move on to another one.

My excuse when I was younger was Oh don't want anyone finding my drawings. Going in rigid order just stifles my creativity. There really is no explanation that is just an odd creative quirk I have. I'm trying organize my hard drive. I have thousands of sketches and when I don't feel particularly creative and still want to draw I can take one and refine it more.

Sketches, thumbnails, and idea generators don't have to be perfect. I've come to terms my sketches are total crap and junk. Later on I'll refine them they aren't master pieces in it's raw form. Some artist's sketchbooks are awesome like everything is detailed and rendered. Like Wes Burt's and  Man Tsang's

Studies of pages from Andrew Loomis's book Head and Hands.








Another thought I am not sure but if I have mentioned this before. In my opinion there are two types of artists Structured and Painty loose artists.
I fall into the Painty loose category I start from scribbles and when I render things I don't blend my medium for a softer smooth look. I just leave it.

Whereas the structured artists might use grids and straight lines and work very cleanly. Their rendering has a smooth blended look. Can't help but blend.

The funny thing is when you are one you want to be more like the other. I have some friends who say Ah!!! I want to have more loose painty strokes in my painting!! and not blend so much. When the loose painty look is forced it looks forced. Sometimes it is hilarious because the mindset to not have organized chaos in the painting does not work out and they return to default mode of blending everything in.

Being a painty loose artist who doesn't go for hyper realism I totally admire the structured artists and their approach. At times I do need to be more refined and not so abstracted. Like freehanding something where I really should get a ruler to make that perfect straight line or edge. When I try to blend things or try to work cleanly it frustrates me. My mind doesn't work that way. Excuse me while I dump paint on this for random controlled chaos. I work in that type of environment. One of my main points I'm not a perfectest and coloring outside the lines works for me.

One of "decent" sketches. Used to take 3hrs+ just to maybe do something like this. Now it takes less than 20mins and usually  get all my stuff out and watch a tv episode but now I finish before the 20-40min episode is over. Yayness! This is ERM one of my best friend's baby. Told her I'd just draw something for her and in the end I liked this so much I'm going to an oil painting.