I am still processing being woken up at 5am by two baby magpies knocking on my bedroom windowsill. I am convinced they knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t even bring me treasure, and it is my birthday tomorrow, so something is going wrong somewhere in the great universal order.
There is no universal order, of course, there is just chaos, and magpies are certainly birds that delight in a bit of chaos.
With yet another night of interrupted sleep, albeit for a better reason than disturbing dreams, it was again a bit of a challenge getting going. I was not feeling drawn to the next stage of the Murphy painting, so I set it aside. I have seen a couple of things recently on the theme of batching paintings, and have been thinking this might be a nice way for me to work, given that I enjoy moving through several pieces in one day.
I pulled out five 6×8 watercolour blocks and an old painting that has been on my mind the past few days, and I got started. The idea is that you do the first stage of the painting on each page and rotate them, which means each one is drying while there’s another one being made. I only did the first stage of each one, and they were still drying because that involved spraying water everywhere, so I pulled out my A4 sketchbook to keep momentum.
I used the same old painting as a reference, but instead of rotating it with the others, I just stuck with it for a while. Here’s where it got to:
It’s a really interesting process to go back to old work and use it as a reference for something new. I’m not trying to recreate the original, just translate it in a different way.
Tomorrow I will be a year older, but hopefully I will have a more realistic sleep.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
157/200
Thrummie Bizzum 
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