Author: Marina

Us in pictures

We didn’t have any picture of us in our house until 10 months ago. We never had, even in our previous flats, even when we weren’t living together. It’s one of those things with no reason at all. It was just us as we were. Us as we were before Olivia was born. And then things started to change, in many ways. One of the things that happened is that we started to print out photos, get canvases printed out for us and all of them went on our walls. There is a narrow corridor in our house, outside the kitchen. We hanged all of our pictures there and O loves looking at them. She smiles at her own pics and tries to grab the other ones. 
And I just put some more up this morning! I printed out these new pics (the ones in the white frames) for G, before he went to SF back in June. Hidden some in his wallet and some in his luggage so he wouldn’t miss us too much. And now are on display, to fill our little narrow corridor with more of our memories!

Back to work!

And the day has eventually come, the day I go back to work after the most eventful year of my life! I wasn’t really looking forward to it and now that it’s here, I feel even worst than I imagined. The only consolation is knowing that little Miss O will be spending a lot of time with her dad, having fun and bonding with him even more than she has so far. I miss them terribly! I’m just glad that the walk to the office is a short and enjoyable one, making my day a little easier. And of course there is always the lunch break when I get to see them and kiss them, making the morning hours moving a bit quicker.

30 drawings in 30 days – first 10 drawings

#1/30 – Municipio – Pescina, Italy
#2/30 – Various plants from the garden – Pescina, Italy

#3/30 – Pescina (old town), Italy

#4-5-6/30 – Various subjects – Catanzaro Lido, Italy

#7/30 – La Tonnina – Catanzaro Lido, Italy
#8/30 – Pineta – Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy
#9/30 – Strada per Pescina, Italy (from photo)

#10/30 – Colline sopra Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy

And the first 10 drawings are done, almost as planned! I have been using my Moleskine watercolour notebook (21 x 13cm) as I’m planning to complete all the sketchbooks I have lying around the house by the end of the year. I have used different page layouts, so far: portrait, landscape, landscape with 4 horizontal inserts and landscape with 3 vertical inserts.
The first batch contains different type of sketches, some of them were done on the spot, some others were done using photos I had taken with my phone. I managed to do one drawing a day, except for drawings number 4, 5 and 6 that were done on the same day…you can tell by the size of the drawings and the lack of details…..

Note: In the UK the hash # isn’t printed on the Apple Mac computer keyboard, so just press “alt”+3.

This week in pictures

So like everyone else on the blog sphere, from time to time I will be sharing a summary of my life through pictures. I take most of my pictures using my phone, it’s always with me and it doesn’t require much effort. The only phone app I sometime use is Instagram. I do love Instagram and its filters, the vintage feel is quite cool and you can easily turn uninteresting pictures in more appealing ones. My Instagram pictures are posted on twitter as soon as I take them, I usually give it some thoughts before shooting, trying to catch more interesting subjects. The phone camera is for everything else, including videos, and the pics stay on my phone until needed.
This week I’m sharing both Instagram and phone photos.
The Instagram topic for this week is the beach! We are having an unbearable heat wave and spending most of the day at the sea.
The rest of the time is spent having fun watching Miss O doing new things…like standing up holding on furniture and trying to climb out of her cot…so much fun!
The photo layout has been edited using a free iPhone app called “photosplit”….it does what I need and it’s easy to use. Shame about the app tag on the final layout.

Back to the roots

It has been a while since I shared my thoughts on here. Although my head has been busy with ideas, projects and various topics I seemed to never find the right time to write about it. It’s the lazy part of me that prevailed over the past few months (two, three?? Has it been that long?). Maybe, or it’s just that all those things didn’t excite me enough to find the time to actually do them/write about them. So after two days of ups and downs, lots of reading and lots of talking to G, I figure out that sometimes you need to go back to what made you start in the first place. It all begun (or better said resurfaced) back in 2005, about a year after moving to London when I enrolled in an evening art class at the local education centre. My childhood memories resurfaced and I rediscovered that sensation of fulfilment that I had lost along the way. Back then it was just a way of relaxing the brain from my daily job, but it soon became a necessity, something I would miss if I wasn’t doing it. And after 7 years it’s still the same…when I’m not painting or drawing I’m thinking about it. So here it comes, a new challenge for the rest of the summer: 30 drawings in 30 days! There are plenty of groups around the blog world that are taking up similar challenges; I might join some of them, just in case my motivation runs low along the way. But I will be doing it just for me, to make sure I do find the time every day to escape into my personal space if only just for a few minutes. Depending on the time available, I’m aiming to post three batches of ten drawings, hopefully with some accompanying text. And all starts today!