Elephant Update

Right, so let me tell you where I am now. It’s been a funny old week, one way and another. So since I last posted on Friday I’ve put a few sessions into the elephant painting. You’ll recall that last Wednesday I made a start on the background. Well, last weekend I put in a few hours on Saturday, and a few more on Sunday, and I really felt I was starting to get somewhere, as you can see by the photographs.

 I’ll be honest, I’ve never particularly enjoyed painting foliage. There might be a way to cheat and do it quickly, but I don’t know how. It’s an awful lot of work, but nonetheless, I’ve stuck to my guns and my resolution in the last few paintings to do the background first.

About half past two on Sunday afternoon I had a phone call from my first born. Basically she had woken in the wee small hours with a terrible headache, and been throwing up intermittently ever since. She couldn’t even keep any liquids down. She’d rung the NHS out of hours service, who told her in no uncertain terms to get to A and E. When she told me this I downed tools.

To cut a long story slightly shorter, she was admitted with suspected meningitis. A lumbar puncture and blood test later, this was ruled out, and feeling better she was allowed home on Monday. In the interim I’d left her at the hospital and returned home on Sunday evening, stopping to pick my grandson up from his Dad. As I was driving home I felt worse and worse, and as soon as I put Ollie to bed, I started throwing up. I got one of my other daughters to take him to school the next day, and rang in sick. By Monday evening the nausea had receded, but I did nothing more with the painting other than cleaning up a bit after the Sunday session which I’d left in a hurry.

Come Tuesday morning, I woke up, my stomach felt a little tender, but not queasy, and I got out of bed. Or tried to. It was something I’ve never really experienced before. It was as if my body had become drunk. My balance had gone completely, and I toppled from one side to the other. To an onlooker it might well have looked quite funny. To me it was frightening. I shuffled downstairs on my bottom, rang work, and settled down for another long day on the sofa.

Thankfully it passed during Tuesday evening, and I was back in work yesterday. We’ve all got over our sickness, I think.

Wednesday evening, then, was Artist’s Group. This is where I’ve got to. 

I’m not saying that I won’t do anything more to the background before the painting is finished – the tree trunks on the bottom right could still do with work, I think, and I want to give more definition to the sandy area between the grey road and the foliage. However, considering my usual inept attempts to paint foliage I’m not at all unhappy with this at the moment. Painting in the elephant now, especially all of those prominent wrinkles – now that is really going to be the tricky bit. Time spent so far – about 8 hours.

As a bit of a postscript, we had to take a couple of hard decisions in Artists’ Group last night. Put in simple terms, we’ve lost a couple of members over the last year or so. However the price of hiring the room has risen in the same period. We took the difficult decision last night that from now on we are only going to meet once a fortnight, until such time as we find a couple of new members. It’s sad, but at least we’re keeping going by hook or by crook, so there is always the chance we can entice a few more people in. I’d be heartbroken if we folded completely.