Cats and Figs and Gardens and Comics

Summer is one of those deceptive times of year. It's a time when you imagine long days of leisure that turn in to long warm evenings of leisure. Sitting around with a drink in hand or going for a walk after dinner. But in reality it's busy. There are camps schedules and when there's no camp schedule there are very long days to fill with parks, libraries, road trips, vegetable gardens, grocery shopping and house cleaning not to mention....work.

In a way it is fun because each day can be different, a drastic change from the day in day out of the school year. In another way it's a challenge to get through the day feeling productive and like you didn't just spend two hours setting up a new online store that you ended up deleting and your kid isn't upset because he's lonely and bored. It's not easy to change your routine on a daily basis. It's not easy to fit in work around the "fun" of Summer with a capital "S"

Still somehow I look around in the morning and think, I really hope I can capture some of my son's life and the funny things he says on paper, draw a comic, play with my paints or all of the above. And Sometimes, in addition to park visits and groceries and bike rides, I do get time to create this or that and it's good and I look forward to the next random summer day.

I hope your summer is crazy mix of long leisurely days and random making it up as you go days and not too many I just need to hide in my bedroom days.

xo Klay

Please enjoy these photos of my life and work :)

A series of cats in watercolor

A girl with a yellow scarf, also watercolor

A fig harvested from our tree

more figs

Our front yard and a beautiful Portland morning

tie dye at the park equals tie dye fingers

my new favorite drawing of the face my son makes when I ask him to brush his hair

A comic is drew this morning

My son enjoying a piece of chocolate cream pie after a long day at bike camp. What a lucky kid!

Our school garden after we spent 3 hours weeding! (and my sweet dog Alice)

Painted ladies available now!

I've been working on these small moody paintings. Some of them are available in my etsy shop klayarsenault.etsy.com

Complaints, sometimes I have them

Thanks to friends who invited us out, Emmett and I had an amazing day playing in the blueberry fields and sandy beach on Sauvie Island yesterday. 
We've been having a rough week. I've been experiencing a particularly difficult time dealing with failure, rejection and my seemingly non-existent career and matching pay check. Emmett's behavior has been off due to the most part with having to be around me I think. At the end of this beautiful day he went to bed ok but he's been suffering a slight cold and it woke him at midnight crying in pain, coming to our room and laying on top of me. "I'm afraid of the dark and I just want to be with you" he says. I then realized that I had only been asleep for about 30 minutes because someone decided to set off early fireworks which freaked Alice out and therefore she needed to be soothed by wedging herself between me and Richard on the bed and she's not a small or lightweight dog but she does have a nice soothing snore. So after a while laying there with a kid on my chest and a dog on my pillow I got out of my bed, leaving the three of them to hopefully sleep and went to the couch. Emmett then followed me to the couch and we both decided, after a few failed attempts to fit together there, to move to his bed. About an hour later, Emmett is asleep, Richard is asleep and Alice is sprawled out in my spot on the bed so I went back to the couch where I laid, wide awake. Two hours later I finally displaced Alice and returned to my spot on the bed where I slept for another two hours. Now it's another morning and it's my job to create a rich and interesting day filled with outdoor play and healthy food, work on a painting, do house work, send invoices, beg people to pay me for work I've done for them, build my art career, walk the dog.... All I can say is, I'll do my best....as soon as I have another cup of coffee, yep, that'll help.

In a way yesterday saved us a little. I am grateful as I try to remember to take the good with bad and this too shall pass.

Why do I....

Always seem to be writing these posts in the last half hour before I HAVE to go somewhere?
I think it's because I really look forward to sharing what I've been doing and I just can't wait. What I've been doing is creating a coloring page based on hairstyles from the 1920s. It was the first assignment for the Assignment Bootcamp class that I am taking with the Lila Rogers Studio and her Make Art that Sells community.
Here is the design that I submitted for the gallery.

Then, I decided to finish the page and offer it up here for anyone who might want to color it.
You can DOWNLOAD and PRINT your own copy here - Enjoy!

Watercolor ladies

Over the last week I've been sketching these 1920s ladies for the MATS Assignment Bootcamp and I've discovered that the under paintings, or what I paint before putting in the details of the face and hair, have a really nice quality to them.

MATS Assignment Bootcamp Adventure 2016

For a while now I have been trying, in vain, to figure every thing out. Sounds easy right? I realized that I have been afraid to move beyond the comfort of my little work room and made a lot of excuses about why taking classes is a racket, then I realized that my main excuse about having or not having a career as an artist was that I hadn't learned how to be one. For example "I'll never succeed because I never went to art school and I'm sure at art school they teach you how to have gallery shows and just generally put yourself out there" Translation, I'm scared to be a failure. Anyway, I am quite aware that I am not now and never will be the only person who feels this way.

I come to this day in a state of desperation. I struggle to make enough money to cover my general expenses and buy food. My husband has a good job but we barley make it to the end of the month with grocery money and we spend too much time explaining the cost of parties and toys and visits to the zoo to our 6 year old. I've always wanted to be self-sufficient and from time to time I have come close with stable graphic design work at great companies that I am very grateful to have once worked. But I found myself becoming angry and depressed at work. I always felt I should be doing something else, not like a choice more like a feeling that this just isn't what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing and if I didn't figure out I'd always be angry and depressed.

So that is the long explanation of why I'm taking this class. I have no expectation that this one class will magically transform my career but it might shine a light on the corner of the big picture. I'm taking this class because I want to get beyond my excuses.

here is my work from today: 1920s hairstyles