Oddity City sketch

Oddity City sketch, originally uploaded by Melsky.

This is a sketch of a new painting I'm working on. I'm going to scan it at various stages of it's completion and make an animation of it's progress.

It is on a new material I am trying out. It's white, not blue but it scans blue and shows every erase mark. It is a gesso mixture on top of wood.

I don't really like it so far. I was hoping that it would be very absorbent but it's not.

I'm trying to decide if I should go to California now or wait until the spring. I don't want to miss any skiing so I kind of want to wait until spring. Then again, the wildflowers will be blooming in the desert and I would love to see that. I'm so excited about walking around LA and taking photos.

I'm toying with the idea of doing a book blog. Yeah, I know i have a lot of blogs already. But this is the last one, I swear. I started using a site called Goodreads to catalog my books, but so many of the books I'm reading are odd old obscure things that are way out of print that don't even show up on the searches. It would be kind of cool if you could add images of your covers but you can't.

I've actually had this idea of the book blog for a long time now and need to find the reviews I wrote over a year ago. I wish I had started it when I was writing those reviews!

Floral Fun, originally uploaded by Melsky.

Isn't this a fun painting? It's one I started about a year ago. I had the backgrounds painted and they didn't look like they would work. Now I put on some foreground colors and black outlining and I love it!

I'm especially fond of the way the lilacs came out. That technique of painting lilacs is something pretty new for me.

Flower Fun abstract floral painting for sale

I took a long walk today and it was beautiful. The snow is all melted and it's fall again. Everywhere you look there are carpets of brilliant yellow leaves. It's not so pretty for people who have to rake and don't like it though.

I just got my first spam comment! Now I feel like a real blogger. I haven't been really worried about spam because I figured if anyone left a spam comment I'd just delete it. To my surprise, this blog does not seem to have an option for deleting comments, unless I'm missing something really obvious here. So I turned on the moderate comments setting, which means that I have to approve comments before they are added but at least no one is going to put links to porn sites on my blog.

To get rid of that comment I had to delete my whole post and put it back up again.

I had one of my photos published on Torontoist last January. I wish I had known at the time, it would have made me happy. It was this photo:


I put some more stuff in my etsy store. I did a lot of housecleaning and laundry. I skipped two days on this blog, oops. I'm trying to write in it every day for the sake of continuity.

It's hot. I hate living in this house when it's summer. It's frustrating because when I go downstairs the foyer is nice and cool, and when I go in the basement to do the laundry, it's so nice and cool down there, it's lovely. The basement apartment was for rent recently and I did think about moving down there. But I think we are going to move closer to David's work.