Tennis

EDM #71  Draw something representing your favorite sport. Tennis is by far my favorite sport. There are others I enjoy watching, but tennis is the only one I really understand, and the only one I really enjoy playing (besides Ping Pong, which is fantastic and I wish I had a table!). The dog is nothing to do with the sport--dogs are generally not welcome on the tennis court--but I do love how excited dogs get to pick up and carry things, particularly large sticks. This is something that always makes me smile. At first I just drew the tennis ball, but it needed something else to save it from a completely boring exercise. Enter the dog.

I have been doing lots of art, and it feels great! I've got all sorts of projects in the works and I'm having such a good time practicing different skills and feeling improvement. I have been neglecting the EDM list, however, and I don't want to do that anymore. My husband is a composer and he has a system for doing small compositional exercises to get warmed up in the morning. He rolls a die to tell him how large the ensemble is, then he rolls dice for which instruments are in the ensemble. Then he'll write a little thing--maybe it will be thrown away, maybe it will be used for something someday--that gets the creativity flowing. So I've made myself a little chart for some dice rolling, too. One roll tells me whether I'll do an Everyday Matters subject, a Julia Kay Portrait Party portrait, or a Virtual Paintout landscape. I might add illustrated recipes, too. The second roll tells me whether I'm doing it in pen, watercolor, charcoal, pencil, or colored pencils. I'm not letting myself spend more than 30-45 minutes or so on it, reminding myself that it's an exercise and it's just for fun! So far I have done two of these exercises. The first is a little watercolor (and ink, because why not?) of cows on the Isle of Wight. I didn't send it in to the Virtual Paintout website because I'd like to spend a little more time on something I send there, but I think it's a great idea for finding random landscapes. The second one is this ball and dog. We'll see how long I'm able to keep this going, but it's great fun for now!