Gerberoy

About 35km north of Paris lies the delightful village of Gerberoy. Located within the département of Oise, its architecture is rich in half-timbered houses and there are even traces of a medieval castle. It is also listed in the plus beaux villages de France (Most beautiful French villages).

I hold Pinterst 100% accountable for the inspiration to do my latest bowl. I saw the photograph above somewhere, clicked, and clicked again and ended up on Jolivillage’s photostream on Flickr.  If my addiction enthusiasm with Pinterest weren’t so, I probably would have forgotten about Gerberoy by now. I wouldn’t have done the sketch below…

…nor would I have taken my sketch to a new level and turned it into a bowl…

NOTE: The image of Gerberoy above is from Jolivillage’s photostream on Flickr, via Pinterest.

On Procrastination

So it’s Friday night, and what am I doing? PROCRASTINATING. I have 4 Christmas presents to paint before Wednesday and  I HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED. Don’t know the themes or ANYTHING. I have however, in true procrastination fashion, purchased a drawing table today. You know, in preparation for the paintings I’ll work on. As my paints are also sorted out nicely, I should be painting right this minute. But I’m not… an invisible force won’t let me.

So what have I done in the last few hours? A very important task, that needed my urgent assistance: create a new Pinterest board. You see, I discovered this wonderful blog called still life quick heart and I started pinning like MAD. I only had one board on Pinterest and realised I HAD to create a new one. And then HAD to go through the 523 pages in this amazing tumblr blog (only made it to page 129) to get inspired to paint, because obviously the dozens of images I’d already found weren’t inspiring enough. After pinning what feels like the contents of 3 galleries on my new board, I realised that not all the pins were showing. So then I HAD to craft a polite yet demanding email to the Pinterest team to inquire as to WHY THE F*CK they weren’t showing. No response yet, but I’m hopeful after scanning the internet for a considerable period of time trying to find out if other people had the same issue on Pinterest. I should be painting now, but I’m not, because I HAD to post about my current procrastination and how it’s affecting me and… and… I should just stop. Right NOW.

RIDICULOUS – RIDICULOUS – RIDICULOUS…. help?

Pinterest

Last night I finally populated my Pinterst page. At first I thought it would be a bit of a pain having to populate a base for me to continue adding images of things that catch my fancy on the internet. However, it ended up being highly addictive…

…and inspiring. Let me explain, in my frenzy to add images, I found out that one can “re-pin” images from other people’s boards on Pinterest. And that’s how I stumbled across this lovely watercolour by Charles Rennie Mackintosh:

And then I remembered that I actually have this book at home:

And it contains some images of his beautiful floral watercolours:

It was therefore only a matter of time that I would end up painting this last night: