Where was I?

After taking an accidental blog vacation for two weeks, thanks to both positive (familial) and negative (server fail) situations, this week I conducted an extensive experiment into what you can screw up when you’re too distracted to really have all your fine motor skills at your disposal.

Whoops, smudge (with archival, waterproof ink no less).

Whoops, break (hoping you can’t see where since I fixed it).

Why was I distracted? Well, my daughter just started first grade at a new school, and though I was about as confident as you can be in that situation, it was still a pretty big drain with the new routine and new people.

Not to mention the effort I spent trying to psychically force everything to be perfect.

Thankfully, as of yesterday, my daughter has declared her teacher “the best ever,” and I think we are all feeling more at ease.

It took me a couple of days to get the message of my mishaps, but I did finally stop trying to do anything at all complicated. First I worked on some arrangements of these new, flatter people.

Then I messed around with a new Cultivate pattern.

But finally I decided to focus on a Wood & Water project that I assigned myself, creating small, simple pieces that could work in between the existing prints in the series. (These are not done – I don’t want them quite this simple!)

I got a little sidetracked from the simpler stuff and made a bunch of these little guys.

I even updated this piece with a better, more even hill.

It turns out, once I had gotten over my initial annoyance at all the stumbling, dropping, and breaking, I actually enjoyed being forced to slow down and keep it simple: revisiting Wood & Water and discovering that I have some new ideas since I last worked on it.

So this week, here’s to recognizing your limitations and working with them, letting them guide you to a next step you hadn’t expected. Also, here’s to my psychic powers! Apparently they’re really working. (Pondering if it would be evil to use them against Donald Trump.)