#2012Diet and Shaking it up

It's been a while since I last wrote about my diet and how it's going. Well I've made some bigger changes.

I'm going to start out by saying that I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, I'm not stating to be an exercise, and what I'm doing is not for everyone... however, I am doing it. I have my reasons, and mine alone.

So after seeing some friends of mine have pretty big transformations in the course of a month on shakes called Body By Vi, I decided to give it a try.

I've previously (in high school) tried those meal supplement shakes that are always in the weight loss section of your grocery store. They never worked, of course I could never stand the taste of them either.

Well I'm giving it a better go this time around, with these shakes. I started on Wednesday the 15th. Today, at my one week check point I am down 3 lbs and 3.5 inches between my bust, waist and hips.

There are tons of recipes for the shakes, to make them taste better - and some of them (with tons of cream cheese) end up looking like more calories then a regular meal would be. I'm avoiding them and sticking with a variety of frozen fruit and milk.

I have a shake for breakfast and a shake for lunch. It ends up working well for me as those are my two most rushed meals. Considering my breakfast was usually McDonalds on the go, it's a much better alternative! My lunch was usually either fast food or oatmeal - on the fast food days its a big difference, not so much on the oatmeal days.

Typically my breakfast shake is frozen strawberries, 1% milk, and the powder. It's quite good. I have some frozen blueberries from my aunt that I'll be trying in there soon too! Lunch I make in the morning, and it's 1/2 Almond Milk 1/2 1% Milk then the powder and one scoop of hot chocolate mix (yeah I know, not super healthy...but it tastes good!).

Now i just need to encourage myself to have more exercise in my lifestyle. We got a dance game for the Kinect, and it's certainly a work out. When I get into it I can play for an hour and not realize the time is gone. However, it is really hard to get into it when my husband, mom, or roommate is watching. I refuse to do it, actually. when their around. So I don't get much exercise. My husband will usually whole up in the office and be good, mom's been gone, but the roommate seeing me dance and jiggle just creeps me right out.

So I'm going to try and do less obvious work outs. That means cleaning the garage (which is over stuffed and badly in need of organization) so I can get to our hidden exercise equipment, or make room for the elliptical trainer mom has at her husband's house.  I plan on doing a lot of things, though I know it's hard when the TV beckons at night.

Oh well it's all in the trying.

Another thing I have noticed after this change is that i have more energy in the morning. It still takes me a while to wake up, but I'm finding it a lot easier to wake up earlier. I'm also finding that once I'm awake I have the energy to do more.

No seriously, I'm doing dishes, taking the garbage out. It's like a miracle shake for mothers everywhere! Ha!

Well that's it for now. Hopefully next week has more numbers. I'm doing the 90 day challenge, so you'll be able to see me either transform myself, or fail. We will see.

Sketching

It's been a while since I sat and sketched, I haven't sat down and done it since we moved to our new house in August.

So last night was all about sketching. It nicely fit in with my nephew's upcoming birthday this Saturday, so why not try my hand at sketching someone I know. Strangers are easy to sketch, you don't have to make them look like themselves, you can just...take artistic license with them, when it's someone you know, the pressure is on!

So I have a ridiculously cute little nephew! He's got one of the most expressive faces! I figured, with such defined features, that this would be easy...yeah, not the case!

Here's my nephew:

And here are the sketches:

Even now, coming back and seeing them I am unsure of the likeness. I know it's him, but that's simply because I meant it to be.

It's the smallest things that seem to define a person. But looking at them, I can't pin point exactly what small change would transform these sketches from simple sketches that vaguely resemble my nephew, to sketches that capture him completely. 

The Stages of Painting

Recently I made a large 3 canvas painting for my sister in law. It's been quite popular as I've now made 3 in total (one smaller, on 2 canvases, and the next the same size). All of them are different, as can be expected when something is handmade.

The large scope of this painting (3 canvas combined at nearly 3m long!) meant that I had to paint fast as I work with acrylics (which dry faster then oils) so to blend my levels of color, I needed to be on the ball.

The effect works out well, as I have always been a fast painter, but it leaves me exhausted once I'm done the first layer.

So here's how it goes. To do something this big you need to set up the canvases. I learned from my 1st try at this painting and enlisted 3 easels instead of the two I was trying to get away with.

After that you can start painting!

I've got the base done (above). When doing something this big I forgo using my nice clean separated pallet and instead go for a big plastic plate. Since the colors are blending, I have to work from the first color (dark brown) and blend towards the beige in the middle. It's always worked better in my mind to just keep adding whatever I needed for each layer.  It always goes a whole lot faster.

When you are working as fast as I was, it tends to get messy as well! So be prepared, paint will fly!

After this I have to wait for it to dry then I can move on to the tree!

You start with the base, the main limbs as I view them. I love painting trees because of how organic the branches are (well that's an obvious statement!). Don't paint a tree perfectly straight. Trees bend, they buckle, the bulge. And where those bulges are there' usually a stick or a new branch, something growing out of it.

You just keep working bigger branch to smaller branch and so on and so forth. I find there's rarely a branch is naturally alone. it is always connected or connecting, moving to divide into 2 or 3 new branches!

The finishing touches are then added. For me, white flowers. I don't get too specific, when you look at a tree you're eyes will "assume" what they are seeing - if that makes sense. Things become an overall picture, try not to concentrate on ALL the detail, but rather do an overall, and add details as needed. It is often needed only a little bit.

I chose to do the flowers smaller on this one, though later I added large white flowers - still not as large as the first one I did.  Even when paintings are meant to look the same, they never do. It's too hard, each painting has a mind of it's own, it's tree (in this particular group of paintings) goes it's own way and flows it's branches out a different way.

Here's an example, the above is the last one I did. Below you will see the smaller piece I did, and then the first one I did. Each changes, but they are all meant to be one and the same.

Painting with feeling

Often when I paint there are very specific things I hold in my mind. 1. What I'm doing. 2. What I want the end product to look like.

I found myself, last night, straying from my usual. Perhaps the stress of life - coming to terms with all last year meant, life's stresses, residual from the holidays, plus mom's cancer - has pushed so far into me that I have no choice but to do what I never do, paint my feelings.

I've always found it to be wishy-washy, painting your feelings. Since my feelings are often conflicting, I always imagined the painting turning out to look, time and again, like a stormy clouds coming or going. But this time I just let it go.

I concentrate on one big issue in my life: Mom's cancer. She's been going through treatment the last 3 weeks. The first week the chemo was so strong that she lost 15 lbs and needed to get an IV everyday she was in for Radiation to try and get some fluid into her. Last week and so far this week she has been off chemo. She needs to be able to eat and drink normally before they put her back on. The worry, of course, is that she could be one of the people who has such a horrible reaction to Chemo....and if she does, what does that mean?

So I was concentrating on that, the range of emotion I've gone through in relation to cancer. I found myself making a painting, which to me, represented hope. It always starts off bleak, the first time you hear the news - you think the worst,t hen there's moments of light, moments of hope, as you get stronger your fight gets stronger, sometimes you see those dark moments again, but you just keep getting brighter and brighter until hope is natural, hope has become reality.

The painting itself is a little abstract, it's all new for me.

So without further adieu, here's my feelings:

Hope.
Still wet