Shitty Painting 3/100

Shitty Painting 3/100 I had a little bit of fun with. My zodiac year is the Dragon and if I were a dragon I think I most definitely would love marshmallows and BBQ and toast and anything smoked or burned on an open flame, which is true of my human self therefore I was a dragon in a former life. 

This is the mindset that made me arrive at this shitty painting. I am pretty "meh" when it comes to raw marshmallows, peeps, marshmallow filled items in general. But when you toast that marshmallow and add it to delicious milky chocolate and crunchy graham crackers it's basically ambrosia. 

Therefore today I am a dragon and I love s'mores.

100 Shitty Paintings 2/100

Todays shitty painting was in part inspired by a craft I did with the shelter kids today. I painted a bunch of trees and they all added their own little tissue paper flowers. The kids had a great time with the craft and they ended up being really neat and we hung them up around the eating area at the shelter. The kiddos were so proud of their artwork and each one of them did such a great job! Now onto my piece of artwork. I would be ashamed to show anyone this piece although I have to admit I had fun making it. I knew I wasn't dedicated to doing it as I had just painted 15 other tree bases for the kids to make their artwork but in keeping with the philosophy of my 100 shitty paintings I decided to follow through with it. May I present shitty painting 2 out of 100: Cherry blossom tree

 

100 Shitty Paintings 1/100

I've been slacking in the blog world. I've been slacking in the creative world in general for a while, part of me blames my laziness from winter but we've been having some beautiful sunshiny days lately and I've been just as lethargic and uncreative as the coldest, snowiest days this winter so I can't really use that as an excuse.

However, I was forced to clean my office/craft room because we hosted Easter this year and for me the easiest way to start cleaning something is by rearranging it. Rearranging or redecorating energizes me, working with a new space feels fresh and fuels my desire to make it clean and beautiful. Thus I had a clean, organized space to follow up on emails, organize contracts and vendor lists for my event planning business and also get up to date on some baby shower things for Kristi.

I was working on a few craft activities for the kids at the local shelter where I now volunteer twice a week and I wanted to listen to a new podcast as I'm up to date on all the previous ones. I started listening to Raise Your Hand Say Yes with Tiffany Han and her latest episode was "10 success secrets of the highly-creative" which seemed like it was made precisely for me in that moment.

She listed 10 great things that successful creative people do that creative people who aren't successful don't do and one of the great ideas that she mentioned almost jokingly was "paint 100 shitty paintings" and her advice was that if you sit down and force yourself to paint 100 paintings, if they are all shitty, the 101st will be pretty good.

I think having a challenge like this, where you can do something over and over with no expectation of it being perfect is exactly the type of motivator I've been needing. So I literally dropped what I was doing (don't worry I finished it but I wanted to show you how dramatic and serious I was) and grabbed my water color pad, watercolors and a few paintbrushes that were nearby and painted the first pretty thing I saw.

I had bought some pink roses and green hydrangeas for Easter dinner and brought the vase upstairs to add some freshness and color to the craft room while I replied to vendor quotes and sifted through months worth of emails to confirm details which you can see below.

You can also see a portion of my office reorganized.

I knew that this painting was going to be horrible and I know that the one crippling fear I have always had is putting out subpar work and attaching my name to it. I am very critical of myself as is so anything I would do that seems amateur would normally be immediately disposed of so I don't have to admit that it is horrible. However, As is the entire purpose of this series of posts, here is my horrible, terrible shameful 1st picture of the series "100 shitty paintings" 1/100

I know it looks like a 1st grader painted it (although that may be offensive to some of you child savants out there) but it's my 1st of 100. It's the 1st of 100 shitty paintings that I will post even though I try my hardest to keep this blog pretty and aesthetically pleasing. I'm excited for this challenge. I haven't set a time limit on it, I've decided I'll paint whenever I sit down at the desk and follow through to the finish. Sometimes I may paint 2 or 3 and sometimes I anticipate it will take me several hours to finish one but I refuse to leave the room until I've finished it and listed it. I'm already feeling creatively inspired to do more things with my bakery business, etsy shop and event planning business. All of the miserable grunt work that has to be done is much simpler when you have a burst of motivation!

Also, to help you recover from that horrific image, here is a picture of Bear on my new Homegoods rug. Clearly I bought it for him to nap on while I work.

Tom Odell-Can't Pretend

Almost finished season 1 of The Blacklist and this song struck me so hard and was such a perfect accompaniment to that specific scene I haven't been able to get it out of my head. Never heard of this guy before, his hair makes me kind of want to punch him, but I dig his music! 

Mexico

We left last week for a trip to Mexico from Shauns work. Wearing lighter weather clothing and hauling giant suitcases that juuuust made the weight limit was our Thursday morning. We just got back Sunday evening and the emails, phone calls, bakery orders and wedding to do list is already growing. Not to mention a couple etsy orders, unpacking, doing laundry and doing my regular cleaning that I put off last week because we were leaving.

 Mexico was such a welcome respite from the bitter February winter, the sunshine beaming down 80* temperatures, drinking slushy coconut drinks out of a coconut on the beach and dancing and downing way more tequila than I will ever do again most likely. I had a ton of fun but I am so happy to be home. It may be grey and dreary here as I type this, but I've got my Bear and I can drink water whenever I want, it's good to be home!

Because of the water situation, I basically lived on a liquid mojito/piña colada diet the entirety of my stay

I was totally in love with the bright pastel buildings, blue, pink, green, purple, teal, they were such a cheery sight to wake up to after leaving the blustery freezing cold grey of Baltimore.

Here is my pale, pasty self trying to blend in with the local foliage. You can tell who is a tourist by how pale and sad they look.

Shaun was way better at volleyball than me.

and way better than I expected. Way to go, babe! 

They had a lot of these cute little guys running around the resort. I tried catching one in a tequila-addled stumble but they are pretty quick.

baby lizard! 

speaking of drinking....we dared Said to climb a coconut tree and he did. 3 times! Funniest moment of the night for sure.

one of my favorite buildings.

I was worried that I had been a little overzealous in my packing for warm weather, but the sunshine was absolute perfection. It was beautiful every single day we were there! 

after one of our more exertive nights of drinking and dancing, a few of us got massages on the beach. I will admit to falling a sleep a couple times during the massage, it was a pretty great idea.

The water was a good temperature, although I think my body was still adjusting to not being in 3 layers so I only got in for a little bit. 

On our last day we decided to go downtown and do some shopping. There was this incredible little leather store that had these beautiful bags in all of these brilliant colors and styles. The entire place smelled so great, I didn't want to leave.

I ended up getting a hardy little tooled leather bag. Although looking back on these pictures I sincerely regret not buying one of every thing.

Shaun looks super grumpy and totally over it in this picture, but really he just turned around and got caught off guard when I was taking a picture of this awesome building. 

see?

My favorite part of the shopping trip was probably getting a giant double scoop of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. 

perfection!

And a few grainy iPhone pictures because they are just too fun and hilarious not to share

This was from our zip lining and amphibious vehicles through the caves trip.

My crazy Tracy and Jess! 

Another "Craig and I reppin Bmore" selfie!

lovin on my boo!

Beach cocktail hour with Luke and Ashley

This is the night I was apparently possessed by the ghost of Miley Cyrus. I'm guessing there are actually far worse photos out there on someones phone, it was a long night.

me and a dinosaur hanging out after zip lining over the jungle

Shaun took everyone from the store out to dinner at Casa Del Agua, great dinner, great company. 

My love.

Again, there are probably far worse pictures out there, I'm not sure what this dance move is called, but next to AJs dad any dance moves I could put out were obviously put to shame.

Although I did have a pretty legitimate meltdown about missing Bear, drank way more than my liver should be able to handle and probably annoyed every cab driver in Cancun with me "tienes Beyonce?" every time we went anywhere  (shoutout to my boy, Arturo for trying to find me Beyonce on the radio), Mexico was a ton of fun and definitely a much needed respite from the stress and cold of February.  Now that I'm back home, I'm ready to tackle all of my to do lists, return phone calls and emails and get things scheduled. Right after all of my Bear snuggles of course.