I did not want to wake up this morning.   The light was streaming in the windows and I had just found the perfect spot in my bed, curled up under blankets with my face in best pillow dent imaginable.  It was glorious.  I hit snooze on my alarm about a dozen times because my body kept begging me for five more minutes.  There is always that part of you that seriously considers for a moment....not going.  Not moving.   Not getting to school or to work.  That moment where you picture how possible, how easy it would be to just stay.

But, there is one class I always, always, always get up for.  I would not miss my book arts class for the world.  I'm truly falling in love with it.  Before I got here, I had a general direction of where I wanted to take my major.  Eventually I wanted to write and illustrate childrens books....but I was also so interested in many other things.  Paper art, binding, dyes and waxes, prints and linoleum cuts, paper marbling, painting, glass blowing, pottery throwing.....I wanted to do it all.  (I still do.)  I felt sort of lost because I was so unfocused and scatterbrained.  I'm still scatterbrained...but now I feel like my book arts class is giving me direction and purpose.  It's tying together the things I love most.  I can create, illustrate, build and bind and make my own paper AND write.  I love it.  There are so many possibilities.

We made our own decorative paper this morning with a wheat starch mix and acrylic based paints.  I had to stop myself eventually.  I could have done it all day...

It was a pretty straight forward project, but the idea of creating a book or a piece with originally hand decorated paper is especially cool.  I used any tool I could find...lace, bubble wrap, plastic bags all scrunched up.  Hopefully, I'm going to try and learn how to make actual recycled paper.  (Whether or not my professor teaches it)  Sometime this week I'll post pictures of a few binded/accordian books I've made.

After a quick break for lunch (I am the master of grilled cheese) I headed back to the studios to go to painting class.  It's a beginners class, sometimes tediously so.  But I'm really trying to find some discipline and learn the right way, even if my brain isn't being as stimulated or challenged as it could be.  I like the process that comes with conceptual works....painting one meaningless still life after another is hard to be patient with.  But that in itself is a challenge.  To find meaning in the mundane.  Your own art should teach you. Right now, in painting, it is teaching me patience.

We had to do our very first self portrait today.  It was a rub-out technique where you coat the canvas in a base color and use cloth to pull it away, creating lights out of a middle grey....and then darkening again in the spaces needed.  It's a push and pull sort of project.  And self portraits are hard. I'm not particularly happy with mine, but it was a learning experience.  I can't tell if it actually looks like me.

Oh well.  I tried.  There are plenty more projects to come and I'm excited for all of them.   I don't know what plans are on tonight, but.....the weekend has begun.  Time for more adventuring.   I'm thinking the Uffizi tomorrow and maybe a hike in Cinque terra on saturday.  I hope I can find some live music to go see tonight.  I love it here.

I miss you.  I hope this blog finds you somewhere happy.

Love, Hayden