Day 45: A trip to the museum and art gallery for Valentine’s day

I went on my first date with my now husband exactly 7 years ago today.  We tend to celebrate Valentine’s day with a little extra attachment because it is also our anniversary.  The piece that I have been working on, which I kept mentioning is this, a scene from our first date.  We went to a movie together and he noticed that I was all shivery when we got out.  He actually wasn’t even wearing a coat (because he’s a crazy northerner) so he took off his scarf and wrapped it around me.  Don’t ask why he was wearing a scarf but no coat.  I think he just though scarves were cool.  Anyway, it was sort of a sweet corny gesture and it stuck with me so I thought it would make a nice picture.

I originally wanted to do a water colour painting of it and give it to him as an Anniversary/Valentine’s day present.  Unfortunately, by the time I got a colour I liked it was around 5 pm on the evening before Valentine’s Day.  I didn’t think I’d be able to do a whole painting in that time so I decided to settle for cleaning up the colour comp to try to make a nice piece out of that. 

It was a bit frustrating because I was doing all of this on my phone with my finger.  It’s hard to get any kind of detail or accuracy with a big finger on a tiny screen.  Also my phone ended up dying while I was working on it and I lost about an hour and a half of work.  It probably doesn’t look like the whole piece should have taken an hour and a half but it took surprisingly long (possibly due to the aforementioned accuracy issues.  Still, I don’t think it turned out too bad in the end.  Not quite what I envisioned but I do kind of like it.  I ended up making a home-made card with this as the cover.  My husband seemed to be quite happy about it and says he really loves he picture so I’m going to call it a success.

My post is super late today because I went into town with my husband to celebrate.  We had a nice brunch, went to a museum and art gallery and then saw a fire juggler on an eight foot unicycle juggle fire under his leg while balancing on the unicycle.  It was quite impressive.  All in all it was a pretty great day but we didn’t get back until quite late.

I did do a couple other sketches as promised.  Ones which are actually today sketches unlike the one above which I finished last night.

The top two were sketches of passengers on the train we took into town and the bottom one is a really rough sketch of a painting I saw at the art Gallery.  When we set out I had all these grand ideas of sketching different things at the gallery.  When it came down to it though I didn’t really want to stand there for ages sketching while my husband was just sitting around waiting for me.  I decided to spend time with him instead and just did this one quick one.  The original painting was by Tintoretto so my apologies to him but don’t look it up or you’ll see how badly I copied it.  In my defense, I was on the last page of my sketchbook so I didn’t have a lot of room to work with.  I probably shouldn’t have chosen a full figure since there was no way I was going to be able to fit him on the page.  So tomorrow I get to start fresh with a fresh sketchbook.  That’s both exciting and intimidating.