Doodles

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Doodles

August 7, 2016 by Jaci Dawn

I spent much of this weekend sitting in a lawn chair with my right foot propped up. I managed to re-hurt it a week ago (not re-break, thankfully), and I have been – again – confined to the lower half of the house. I’ve made a couple trips up the daunting stairs over the weekend: once to pay bills online and once to grab some art supplies so I’d have something TO DO while sitting around. (Okay, we own two very large dogs. Usually, we leave a light on in the bathroom to illuminate the hallway at night. We neglected to do so last Sunday evening. My booted foot collided with a ninety pound English Setter in the dark. The resultant collision probably bruised the dog, definitely turned the air blue, and sent a shock wave down the length of my foot that confined me to bed for the following two days. I’m finally past that and am back upstairs, blogging. Now you know.)

The weather has been cooler than I prefer (read: “a perfect Oregon Summer” to the Natives). Every day has been breezy. Even those days which have achieved what *I* consider “perfect” (89 degrees or above) have been chilled by the west wind, and I find myself resorting to long sleeved shirts. Since I have been relegated to light walking and waiting for the pain of the most recent sprain to abate… I wondered how I would draw the summer breeze?

I stretched out under the perfect blue canopy that matches the perfect blue summer sky, and felt the breeze chill my arms and cool my feet. I began to doodle with my colored pencils. My first doodle is reminiscent of the stuff I produced when I was still under the age of thirty. I started with hanging vegetation, then curling hair, eyelashes… The finished 8×10″ is not my favorite:

Original

But run it through a photoshop program, and I *love* the “chrome” version of the same:

Chrome

Today, I was a bit more pragmatic. I started with the stereotype of wind: a puffing cloud face. I left off the actual face. The breeze is capricious, so the lines had to be capricious as well. There needed to be moving grass along the bottom of the doodle. And a leaf, dancing in the wind, but not an autumn leaf: a summer leaf. The clouds needed to be moving in.