New board

A rare and wonderful creature - free day for painting and spending quality time in my house with no diversions; even the sun left me alone today, removing the temptation to retreat to the garden. Procrastination is always a fun way to spend a morning but today I motored into town to buy paint after only a shower and a quick whiz around Tesco to spend our Clubcard vouchers on necessary groceries to ease the week's budget. Iceberg lettuce for only 40p which served the dual function of continuing our alliance with seventies home economics and feeding my current leaf craving. Lack of sugar has turned me into a rodent and I spent yesterday thinking about rocket and watercress. Strange. Stomach responding well to the lack of fermenting however and feeling bouncy and able to get down to work for once; studio disco music not even needed today. If all else fails and I am in danger of frittering an entire evening avoiding the onset of painting I resort to the disco playlist, originally titled 'Kick-ass boogie' before the film Kick Ass came out. Ahead of my time as ever; I am soothsayer.
Popped around a show in the Scottish Gallery while in town; Archie Forrest, someone I was not familiar with I have to confess but enjoyed his colours very much. Plenty of my favourite orange, various lovely blues and some really ballsy reds in some of the still lifes. Fondness also apparent for patterned textiles which obviously appeals to me; I am in pattern central just now and few surfaces are safe from the printing potato and the scratchy pointy end of my brush.
I really want to get into some still lifeing myself but the cats intervention cannot be underestimated, so I will have to incorporate elements and objects of a more weighty nature and definately not flowers. These will be merely viewed as food or enemies and injested or flung across the room accompanied by yowling (interchangeable). I am still working on little boards for the show in the Leith Festival; just working out framing dates and possibilities so I can get it all done before my bibby holiday to Southsea. Hoping for more inspiration of a nautical bent, but who knows what will ensue - it is never the obvious that attracts my sketching pen.
Guns blazing on the food budget today, in part due to a sublime bit of planning this week including the midweek leftover night and tonight the chicken breasts that were marinating happpily since the chicken massacre a few days ago. Not true, actually, as is was Stu at work on that occasion so the portion control was a little better and so the knifework. We now also have two big tubbies of chicken stock in the freezer for a later risotto, noodley thing or similar.
The chix had been wallowing in some very good soy sauce that I chose merely on a whim in the Chinese supermarket on Leith Walk, but which has proved excellent and quite gloopy/rich, making a change from some of the piddly versions oft found in many a supermarket. Found a fanatastic one in Vietnam, but haven't bumped into it over here and to be honest cannot remember the name for love nor money, so may no longer recognise it if confronted.
With our chicken we knocked up a stir-fry cum braised rice; the rice cooked off in our trusty rice cooker and mixed up with some (frozen) stir fry veg. mix jollied up with some of the aforementioned gloopy soy, some dried chilli and sweet chilli sauce.
Well ahead of the budget going into my solo day off tomorrow, so I may have the elusive pleasure so rare in our lives of a day without any shopping at all - just luxuriating in the sensuous pleasure of a few new tubes of paint and a blank board; I am thinking twilight garden, with pinky red sky and lush leafage.
Paint quantity is as necessary as quality; I can totally trash a picture trying to scrimp out the last of a tube or randomly substituting another colour due to lack of materials. It's a fools economy at the end of the day as I end up with a less than satisfactory result from a day's work and a niggling dissatisfaction at not achieving the elusive translation from picture in head to 2D version on piece of wood.