Feeling busy and stale. Sad. Might be that I am a bit housebound...but the work is frustrating and fast...where a more sophisticated approach isnt understood (more color is better and please fill up all the white space...). But I am feeling stale and inept with illustration (I have no idea...but my confidence is in the crapper. Its been only 3 days of just us...so I need to give it time... and we are expecting an impromptu guest tomorrow night. I will not have a chance to prep the room, make up the bed in advance...Rob is in two all day meetings with dinner tonight. The truck is still broken, so I am situated at the Camp House with nothing to drive. Enough kvetching...? Sorry.

I am using the new things I learned with Jean and Nancy (brush making, live paint, live trace, "average" points) and I am surprisingly making some productivity strides. Additionally, I am reading two books on illustrator (one paper book, another on my kindle and picking up all sorts of other new stuff along with the power user stuff (like the minus sign is the minus points key)...

Whitney Sherman, Chair of the Illustration Dept. at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) broadly asked for names of books/etc. for the History of Illustration she is teaching this fall. However...good things flowed from this call for entries--this marvelous, eccentric, smart and illuminating blog surfaced, "A Journey Round My Skull" captioned as ""Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature." Recent obsessions: illustration and graphic design." Will, the author surfaces interesting and new people everyday along with smart mini "bloglets" on illustrators, ideas (like beards)--a magic place where Will's imagination captures ours and we soar together.

Take a look. Click through the placeholder pictures on the right. Interesting and a big time consumer.

Time to take Kitty out for a sandwich!