nothing in particular

I guess I just figure as long as I'm still up and in the room I ought to write something more interesting than just a bunch of chick numbers.

I was asked the other day if I think my drawing style has improved with all the time I've been spending on the chicken illustrations. I would say yes, I think it has improved, and it has certainly changed. It's not so much that I'm doing things better (well, sometimes!) but I'm doing things differently. I have certain color combinations pretty well memorized now, so there's no hesitancy of "how do I make this particular color." I'm finding that even if it's not exactly the same as something I've already done I've gotten a lot more comfortable with colors in general and I can pretty well figure out what to layer (and in what order) to achieve a particular result.

I would bore you to tears if I had a web cam of me doing art. It's not like watching a real energetic painter make grand sweeping motions across a spacious canvas... it's little itty bitty teeny movements, mostly my fingers, sometimes my wrist, rarely my elbow, layers and layers of color over the same area of the drawing. I like to draw when I am at art shows (like Draft Horse Classic). It used to be kind of creep me out to have people watching but I've gotten used to it. I always think I must be about as exciting as watching the grass grow, but I've been told it's almost sort of hypnotic. Weird.

Speaking of weird, how about the horses... Gwen has mellowed out a little, but she still won't let Shylah and Patrick in close proximity. If they are all out in the pasture she'll be a reasonable distance away and not seem concerned, but if they get too close Gwen goes into attack mode. Patrick, however, has lost his pasture privileges and is now confined to the corrals again. He cribs (google this if you need more info, basically they grab hold of the fence or anything else with their teeth, pull back, flex their neck, and suck in air. I guess they get sort of a "high" from it...weird). Anyway, he's a real cribbing junkie. E.H. told me that he was, so I knew this when he came here. He did it in the corrals, but then for a couple days he stopped when I put him out on pasture. Well, that didn't last too long, so now while the girl horses go off and do normal horsey things like graze, eat mulberries under the tree, snooze in the shade, roll in the dirt, etc), Patrick spends probably 75% of his day cribbing. That's rough on the wood fence, he pulls hard and those boards can't take that sort of abuse, and it also just irritates the crap out of me to hear him out there going "GULP!" all day. So, no more pasture for him. If he's going to stand around and suck on the fence all day he's going to have to be in the pipe-fenced area where he can't do any damage. I do put Shylah in with him at night, partly because she's morphed into an enormous lard-bucket, but also because they get along and her being there shuts him up, because otherwise he neighs ALL NIGHT. I'm now referring to him as the neurotic freakazoid horse. He absolutely can't be alone. He will spend the whole day in the corral alone, pacing the fenceline the whole time, and work himself into quite a sweat. He's just not my kind of horse, and will definitely be going home by the end of his two months here. He's not a bad horse, he just has "issues." His owner gets just as irritated with him as I do!

The chicks are hatching..got a couple Cuckoos out so far.

Bed time.