Slaying boredom by painting dreams at 35,000 feet

| maggiebird
Sketching while flying
This is my watercolor kit for traveling. It’s small, fits in my laptop case, and I can paint almost anywhere with it. Clockwise from top left: Sakura Sumo Grip mechanical pencil;  Aquash Watercolor brush; Windsor Newton travel paint box; Handbook Artist Journal (5.5″ x 5.5″).

I admit, we are stay-at-home types. I didn’t use to be, but after we bought the Tree House, it seems like I never want to leave. As a result, we don’t travel much. But this summer seems to be our summer of criss-crossing the country.

First there was a girls-gone-wild week in Eastern Nevada with my traveling red-headed friend. She’s been spending the first few years of her retirement seeing the West from her Toyota Tacoma.  Oh my, but that was fun. We were really out of control. I mean, we had TWO bags of cheesy poofs! We stayed up until 10! We talked to strangers!

Then there were two weeks on the east coast with the fiddler, wrapped in humidity that boggled my mind. (I’m from the arid West, where, if the thermometer drops much below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I wear a wrap to ward off the cold. In Connecticut at 86 degrees,  I sincerely considered just how naked I could get before I would upstage the bride.)

Being on the road; or in the air; or at a wedding; or touring New England means there was little time to drag out the sketchbook and draw, or unpack the plein air supplies and paint.

The best time to paint turned out to be on the airplane. Boredom and enforced stillness turns on my creative tap. I need to spend more time being bored.

girl typing
I took it upon myself to be the dream giver, but one of the other passengers was my proxy model.

 

Dream surroung
Detail of couple sleeping and the dreams I gave them.

7 thoughts on “Slaying boredom by painting dreams at 35,000 feet”

  1. Great to hear from you Mockingbird! This means you are back? We get to draw with you again on Thursday?

  3. Hi Margaret, I really admire your art and the sense of humour in your writing. Oh, and do you really live in a tree house??

    1. Thank you Anne! Our house isn’t really built in a tree. But it’s surrounded by trees, and it’s on stilts so that you only see trees when you look out the windows or are on the deck. It feels like a treehouse. (We used to call it the bat house, because when we moved in, there were bats living in the attic. They’ve all been excluded, so we can’t call it the bat house anymore.)

Comments are closed.