Saturday 10 January 2015

New Year and a Thirty Day Challenge

A good creative start to the year. Patchwork going well. Lots of promise on the felted art front: the pop up gallery before Christmas cleared me out of 10 pictures, and this week I packed up my remaining 8 and visited the lovely Angela at Popular Pots in Clevedon, who promptly took 6 of them to see if she can sell them, and asked for the 7th after I have reframed it. This morning a cheque arrived in the post as the 4 small beach pictures I had in Church House Designs in Congresbury had sold. A good positive feel, and for a lovely change, a big space in the room where normally lots of framed work lives, taking up space and nudging me into believing I am a failure at this art lark. Be gone! And the big space where that nastiness was is now beckoning me to fill it with new art, better art, art for North Somerset Arts week in May. Perfect timing.

In the meantime I have my other new creative passion to keep me company. I had a day or two of worry that once my photography course finished, the creative spirit would leave me and I would no longer have the ability or urge to take a beautiful picture. But the arrival of a few new lenses has helped, as has a resolution to ensure that one morning a week will still remain a photography morning. I was concerned I would lose the impetus to keep taking photos, so when trawling through Pinterest, I found a 30-day photography challenge, with a different theme for each day. Today is Day 10. Would you like to see?

Day 1: Self Portrait.
Not easy, or comfortable, but I found the wrinkles were suitably softened by the slightly hazy 150-year old French mirror I bought for husband for Christmas, that and hiding half my face behind the camera. I am also very aware that self-portraiture features twice more in the thirty days so there will be room for plenty of improvement from this...

Day 2: What I Wore

Day 3: Clouds. They were elusive on an unmitigating grey day, just a grey blanket of rain, nothing visible to focus on at all, and I had resorted to photos of clouds in mobile phone shops, art galleries and on pub signs. Then these arrived as I had given up and got back to the car park...

Day 4: Something Green. Easier today...

Day 5: After Dark. The £1.16 I spent on LED finger lights for the children's Christmas stockings was invaluable with a slow shutter speed.

Day 6: Obsession

Day 7: Changes to Come. A difficult choice. I started off doing a perfectly respectable shot of different fruit and vegetables, then dismissed it as being a bit too predictable as a New Year's health kick (as I have in real life, lovely doughnut earlier today). I found a frame and stuffed it full of wool, patchwork, a pincushion and a camera lens as a nod to my resolve to be more creative this year. But on reflection, it was just not a good enough picture. I was stumped. Luckily Day 7 was also my self-assigned photography morning and I had headed off to somewhere rather beautiful to take pictures. It suddenly occurred to me that one of these would count as a change to come for all of us at some point. So sorry, my dear recently bereaved friend who always reads this. But thank you Arnos Vale Cemetery.

Day 8: Routine

Day 9: Someone You Love. How hard it is when your two children have got sick of you trying to take the perfect candid picture of them, and they gurn their faces into forced grins, revealing the witchy gaps where new teeth are growing, and husband leaves before 7:30 am and is only home when you and he are too weary to think of taking a picture. I had a cute picture of the cat but didn't want everyone on Flickr to think I'm the mad cat lady. So eventually girl in the bath came kinda good...

Day 10 (today): Childhood Memory

What would you have done?

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