After last nights crisis and some great suggestions from my online friends I thought I would  start my day with either
1. a walk and sketch
2. or setup a simple still life to experiment with
but well, I caught up on my sleep from the BCN rego the other night so 1. was out.
I then started to collect some objects for 2. but it seemed like too much hard work and a little contrived… so instead I just drew the random scattering of objects before me…it was just a warmup exercise to get my creative juices pumping

I am trying to work more in my studio corner- I have an enormous B0 drafting table which is so big that it just collects objects. It was interesting how the things in this sketch are a record of a number of things that I have done lately…. AND I will tell you more about that palette on the left soon- I promise!

On the right is a plastic tray from a packet of caramel slice that I use for my dirty water – each compartment is a different coloured dirty water so I don’t need to change it as often.

This little sketch helped me attack my action list with a lot of focus. for the rest of the morning.

And then tonight I collected all the teapots I own and put them together…  and did this fun page! I have never composed a still life before but have a general  idea how to go about it. 7 teapots without a huge variety in texture and colour isn’t really an ideal collection for a good setup… but I thought that sketching them in a more of less random shuffle was a good way to get my brain thinking about still lifes as an evening sketching exercise. I could also get back to my ABC of home AND I also could sketch people/figures (in fact I did that earlier but probably won’t bother posting them!)

BTW I really appreciate all the comments about wet paint and palettes…  I thought I would have a look at the Martin universal design mijello palette. Dick Blick has it for $12US – put an order in to see how crazy the postage is…$22US! So total of $34US=$32AU. Ok… that is crazy. Can I get it locally?… yes for $30 plus $12 postage – so total $42AU.

Ah! we are so far away from the rest of the world…everything is so expensive and it always seems cheaper to buy overseas even with spending twice the value of the object on postage…
maybe I don’t need it after all… I was just looking!

I will do a follow up post summarising all the great comments and what I have decided to do (hmm, don’t know totally…but it looks like regularly ‘watering’ of my palette to keep moist is something to consider seriously)