Wow, time is so wibbly wobbly timey wimey. Let’s see it’s been awhile since I last did my show and tell.

In the Zentangle zoom classes I go to, we have covered two subjects… Infographics and White Stone Carvings. I have also started drawing nouns, because I am having difficulty remembering their genders and thought an Infographic would be a fun way to remember. Hmmm what else… Oh, I got my second vaccine shot this week and after a day of flu-like symptoms and going on 5 days now of a migraine, I’m on my way to being fully vaccinated (two weeks after the injection day). Oh right, I also went out on a Sunday to take photos of flowers, but I was in the middle of a 5-day vertigo (episode, event, cluster?) I tried to take some macro photos of flowers with mixed results… partly due to remembering how my camera works (heh, it’s been a while folks) and partly because macro photography when you have the spins is difficult. Oh and of course, I have some photos of the pups. So let’s get started and see how far we get. 🙂

Zentangle Infographics

This was a 3-week class (every Friday for about 3 hours), where we explored the zentangle tangle/pattern called Waybop. It’s a tangle that looks like it interlocks and thru brainstorming and collaboration many variances were thought up. I liked several, got a bit behind in class, looked up and realized I misunderstood one of the variances, realized I wouldn’t have a enough space, got overwhelmed and then just watched for the rest of class. I forgot to take a photo of the drawing after class. The next day, I came back to the drawing and worked on it at my own pace…

White Stone Carvings

This was another 3-week class (every Friday for about 3 hours), that we finished this week. I really enjoyed this one. The inspiration is the Alhambra Stone Carvings in Spain.

We spent the first class going over light and shadow. The second class we started to work on the carving. I practiced on my own in between classes because I realized the two different types of paper I was using responded differently to the media. This week, the 3rd class in the series, we finished up the carving and learned how to do the background… I wasn’t able to finish in class, so I did small areas as we learned each thing during class. I finished working on it at my own pace after class…

Also I made you a gif…

Macro Photography with Vertigo

Like I said earlier, I had been having vertigo for days when I decided to just try to take photos anyway because I love water drops (and they are rare in SoCal), but I quickly found that it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. I ended up culling most of the photos because they were blurry/out of focus… but these were ok… I spent a great deal of time trying to get the spiderwebs and droplets to be as interesting as I found them…

German (and Spanish) Nouns

The day before my second vaccination shot, I had a migraine and laid down to take a nap. While napping I was thinking about Duolingo and how I was having trouble remembering the gender of the German words. Oddly, I’m doing ok remembering gender in Spanish because the endings of the words help me out. I started thinking about how children learn language, and how maybe I needed a children’s book in German. Then I thought about Richard Scarry‘s book and how I liked the images with the name of the item written underneath… I could do that. I could practice drawing while learning the gender of German words! After some soup and going to bed early so that we could get up early for our vaccination appointment, I once again fell asleep thinking about drawing and learning German. Once we got home from the vaccination appointment I started drawing… it helped me not think about how much my arm was hurting at the injection site. That night I had fever/chills, a headache, my neck muscles felt a bit stiff, and my skin hurt… basically the beginning stages of ConPlague (if you’ve ever gone to a conference like ComicCon, you know ConPlague)… or what other people refer to as the flu, I assume. I didn’t take any medicine because they said to wait so that you can build antibodies, I had a fitful sleep where I would wake up and drink water to cool off and then fall back to sleep. Finally in the morning about 24 hours after the injection time, I took some Excedrin for my headache. I started to feel much better about an half hour later, and went back to drawing. I continued to draw each day when I could, the headache returning and me trying to mitigate it. Yesterday, unfortunately, nothing I did would get rid of the headache, so I did not draw. And today, I still have the headache, but decided to blog instead of draw. Whew, that was long-winded… long story short here are some of the nouns I ‘know’ in German separated into gender…

I would send cellphone snaps to my mother-in-law, with whom, I’m studying Spanish. I though, you know, she might like these nouns in Spanish, so I duplicated my drawing and then altered it to be Spanish so that I can have both, and I can send it to her as well. I ‘know’ a lot more words in Spanish than I do in German because I started it months earlier, so there is still much to be done for the Spanish one. But I’m finding this to be a fun project, and hopefully it’s helping me learn too. 🙂

Pups!!

The pups have been enjoying my afternoon naps… see during the daylight, I’ll allow them up on the bed. At bedtime, they have their own beds, and I need room to kick and rotate as I deal with hot flashes and night sweats… but for some reason in the middle of the day, I’m kinda cold, so naps are GREAT! and a warm dog is nice to snuggle with 🙂 At some point, Penny started asking to get up on the bed at sunrise, and being that it was daylight, I’ve allowed it… as well as invited Duke up too. So here’s a snap of this morning, as you can see (me outlined in red, my hubby outlined in blue), it’s a bit tight. I think the pups are requesting a King size bed 🤣😂…

Stay safe everyone! And wash your hands! 🙂
Until next time…
~nic