Coupon Win.

This post is brought to you by Michaels. Without them, I wouldn't be able to get 40% off of everything I bought this week. Mind you, they only allow one coupon per transaction, so I did get a snobby look from one of the cashiers when I told her I wanted to do two transactions because I had two coupons. But she did it, and now I have lots and lots of painterly stuffs. In all, I bought two canvases, one beginner's set of acrylic paints (six colors), a double-adjustable easel, an extra tube of paint (orange wasn't included in the six colors), a set of 25 brushes, and a plastic palette to mix colors and whatnot. Pretty freaking awesome.

The canvas that H. and I bought is 24"x30", which is a pretty decent size for a painting. Definitely bigger than your standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper. I thought the best way to paint the image I wanted was to sketch it out on some piece of paper first, then transfer it onto the canvas once I'd worked out all the kinks. I'm sure there'll be kinks. As luck would have it, we still had some of the packing paper the moving company used to fill space in the boxes they packed. It might be called butcher paper, but I refer to it as packing paper, and luckily we had two sheets of it left in the corner of the office that neither one of us uses. The paper is an inch or two wider and a half inch shorter than the actual canvas, which is a remarkably close fit if you ask me. I packed up my little world peace themed tote bag with the packing paper, a half-frozen water bottle, and the camcorder and set out for the nearby park.

Well, first I went to a nearby office supply store and bought pencils, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, and colored pencils. But I did make it to the park.

In the sun, it was about a million degrees today. In the shade, it was about 50 degrees because of the cold, cold wind. As I was walking from my hundred degree car through the million degree sun towards the park, I decided it would be nice to sit in the shade under a little gazebo thing that had tables where I could draw. Little did I know that after sketching the outline of the mountains I would start to freeze to death. I even switched tables under the gazebo so that the sun was shining on my back in an attempt to thaw out. I tried to tough it out, and got about halfway done with one color on the sketch, but eventually the wind started blowing in such a way that the paper started flipping up. Very frustrating.

Here's a poorly lit picture of my sketch, followed by a closeup for those of you who like details.

I'll probably do one more round of dark blue, then hit it up with an orange or a yellow, followed by a splash of bright robin's egg blue. Stay tuned for progress reports and percentage completed numbers.

What's that? You want to know how my gladiolas are doing? Well why didn'tchya say so! Two of them are growing tall and strong, and one of them got a little bendy in the leaves and started swaying towards the sun (again, chyea), so I had to rotate the box around. Haven't done that in a long time. The three of them are starting to become water hogs. I suppose that's a good thing. Well, here they are.

That's the canvas in the background to compare the greenery to. The canvas measures 30" tall, so I suppose these guys are right around 34" tall now. And to think we planted these a month and two days ago. The interwebs says it takes 90 days for buds to form, but it would be nice to see flowers before then.

And now for the awesome wedding-related picture of the day! I realize I've already done a bouquet countdown, but I can still admire more flowers, right? How sweet is this bouquet:

New Zealand Wedding | SMP

Any idea what the small blue flowers are? I was going to say Lily of the Valley, but I thought that only came in white.

Have a lovely night, folks!