She is Positively Grateful, Face 8

I stumbled upon this face tutorial by Pam Carriker.  She has created a face stencil to help people draw faces. I don't have the stencil, but her guidelines and ideas for shading are really helpful for creating Face 8, She is Positively Grateful.  I found a fixative that prevents pencil drawings from smudging. YES!

I used pages from a Chinese book I found at a church yard sale several years ago.  I sprayed Color Shine chartreuese onto the background, applied gesso,  and I also tried out a new stencil.

I also used a fine tipped marker to draw the tree and flowers.

The visual journal entry is celebrating this journey that I am on, the mystery of where this is all going is exhilarating.   "I am grateful he would be there along the way" is a way of telling my husband and son that I am grateful for all of their support, feedback and encouragement.

I found out today that my "baby" (my Canon Rebel camera), is not feeling well and may need a new motherboard.  By the time I send her away to the camera hospital and get her diagnosed, it is possible that it could cost me $390 to get her fixed.  With a few hundred dollars more, I could buy  a new camera with more megapixels than she is. Hmmm, what to do?

I was told her lifespan is near the end.  I told my husband the news and he immediately went to his secret stash and gave me all of his money that he has been saving for two years to buy a new saddle for the new horse he just welcomed to our family.  I can't believe his generosity.  He said that I would use the new camera a lot more than he would use the saddle.  He told me to go buy a new camera and think about him each time I will use it.  He said he can save again, even if it takes another two years, and that there is no rush. Can you believe it?

This isn't the first time that he has given me his money for a camera.  After a year after I received my first digital SLR as a gift from my entire family, my camera was involved in a pontoon boating water log. As I was rescuing everyone's fishing gear, my camera bag floated out to the middle of the lake and my camera was destroyed.  I moped for a whole week.  I had waited for so long for such a camera, and now it was useless.

A day before our family summer vacation, my husband came home with a new camera for me.  He used his money that he had been saving for years to buy a roping machine.  I couldn't believe it, and now he wants to do the same thing. Sniff, sniff...

He is the same guy that has given me art lessons and a photography workshop with Art Wolfe for gifts, and will drive hours to visit my favourite art supply store.  He encouraged me to enter my art into the Summer Games a few years ago, and enter it into the Exhibition and Stampede Art Show, when I doubted that my art and photography was good enough.  I ended up earning a bronze medal for my pen and ink art.  Who knew?

How did I get so lucky?

I am positively grateful!

If you are wondering, I had to use my iPhone camera, excuse the quality of the photographs.

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Here is a little surprise, my son came home the other day and said that he was in an art class at school.  He hasn't been in art since grade seven.  His assignment was to draw any object.  I think he did very well.  His usual things he used to draw were vehicles and that was when  he was up to my waist in height, now I have to look up to him.  I am sure proud of him and his willingness to do something new!