I’ve noticed fairly recently that sitting down and having rests on the dog walk is perfectly OK. It never used to be that way, and if I stopped to chat to somebody or just sat to look at the view Cosmo would get aggitated and even bark at me. ‘Come on, this is waisting time!’ Now a rest enroute is perfectly OK and a welcome bit of time to just watch the world go by. In fact Cosmo has been known to just to randomly sit down (in the shade) when he wants to.
This development in our relationship has enabled me to make drawings, take photos and just take things in a more relaxed manner than before. So I intend to take advantage of this and start drawing and painting the local area on my walks with Cosmo. So tommorrow I have a morning out drawing planned.
Over the last few days I have been preparing for painting. This means grinding my own pigments from rocks taken from the cliffs at Reculver a couple of miles along the coast from where I live.
I have greys and yellows and have burnt some rocks in the bonfire to make new darker colours, including an amazing red made from yellow rock!!! White I have to get several miles further along the coast from chalk cliffs. Black…I made some charcoal from twigs taken from trees in my garden and again made in my bonfire. Then I crushed the charcoal down to form a black powder.
I was concerned that if I was to paint the local landscape I would need greens and blues etc. Then Today walking along the cliff top I said to myself, aboriginals, native americans, african tribes and most cultures were using colours they obtained localy. So the colours are what they are and ‘yellow is my favourite colour anyway’. So no blue skys or green grass.
