Precious Little

So this week, I've been playing catch up with my Getting Through the Grey assignments. I have a confession to make: I am not on task. For the last week, we were supposed to be exploring bokeh and here I am working on still life. (Which I think was week one or two...way back in December.) Sometimes you just have to do the things that you are moved to do. There's no predicting when inspiration will strike, nor how it will manifest and I am totally okay with that.

The whole point of taking a class is for the teacher to empower you to find your own creative voice. The idea is for you to gain some new skills and then find a way to integrate them into your own art practice. This is how you know you've taken a really great class, with a really great teacher. (And a really great teacher will support you in following your creative instincts, even if you veer off task once in awhile!)

Yesterday I was shooting little things in my studio. The top image is a frozen Charlotte doll. I thought it would be more interesting to shoot the back, rather than the front.

 

I have this lovely antique sterling silver salt shaker, given to me by one of my partners in the Petite Inspiration Swap at Hallowe'en. It's tiny-only an inch tall and I love the patina on it. Old things have so much soul to them.

Another wee doll, this time a Kewpie, shot from the back. I couldn't resist! There's just something so sweet and innocent about it.

This image is all kinds of nostalgia for me. It's a lumber yard pencil I found in my Gramps' workshop, after he died. His family owned a lumber yard and so he grew up in the business and became a gifted carpenter and cabinet maker. After he was gone, I would go into his workshop to be amongst his thing. It was comforting to smell the wood shavings and see his hand tools hanging neatly on the pegboard above his workbench.

He had three banks of drawers-I believe two were old library file cabinets and one was wide, shallow drawers that could hold architectural plans. All of them were dark wood and well made. I'd spend hours opening every single drawer and looking at the things inside each one. He knew exactly where everything was. (I guess I come by that whole tool and workspace organizational gene honestly.)

I found a couple of these flat lumber yard pencils he brought from Winnipeg when he moved out west. They live in my studio now. It's funny how the most insignificant things become precious.