Fox on a Boat

Puhutko sinä englantia? Hello all! This will be a very short post. I mentioned in passing in previous posts that I was learning languages. I have now created a blog about that! I will be writing about my goals, achievements, the things I find difficult.. The learning journey, basically! Here is my introduction post , and here I wrote about my first week (and resources used). -- Are you also learning a language? Do you blog about it? Let me know in the comments below!

As you may know, today is/was World Poetry Day . Around these parts, it's coming to a close, but it's not quite over yet! I've been trying to post to FB and tweet  quite regularly all day, so this post will be like a round up of poetic goodness. You may also know that I am very interested in languages and translation, so I've tried to share as many translated poems as I share English ones. (You may also know that I am attempting to self teach a few languages, but I'll talk about that in more detail a little later). I tried to make today into a little project, and though I didn't do as much as I would've liked, I'm quite happy with what I did. My idea was to bring art and poetry together with loose illustrations based on the poems I'd share. I was going to paint abstract paintings but it didn't quite work out that way. Well, enough talk! I present to you now the three poems I used as artistic inspiration: #1 - "The Wandering Guitar

Recently I've been painting a lot more, which I'm quite happy about, as I often end up neglecting one or more of my hobbies/ creative outlets and get caught up in Life (with a dramatic capital L). I hope to transition to inks soon - I've tried them already and enjoy using them, but haven't quite mastered the technique yet. After buying a pack of inks on sale last year, and then being gifted another pack, I feel I really should start using them!  The advantage of watercolours is that they are 'erasable' to a certain degree, so mistakes are not always the end of the world. Not so with inks! I am hoping that my extra watercolour practice will help me when I start painting with the inks again.  I have quite a few project ideas, so will definitely be updating the blog with some new paintings soon. You can check the gallery , which I try to update fairly regularly, to see all the paintings I've posted so far.

I have ' the stationery thing '. I own two moleskine sketchbooks that are nearly full, and a third one with only a few pages used. The full ones have seen many months, and many scribblings. Some useless, some boring, but a few somewhat funny ones, and even some good drawings from time to time. At first I wasn't too sure what to do, and varied between 'you can scribble anything' and 'make it good sketches only', sometimes only writing things half-heartedly, or trying to hard to 'seem' like random scribblings. It shows, but I don't mind so much. It is part of the process. Sample sketchbooks scribblings Some pages I can look back upon and remember almost exactly what I was thinking at the time. Others, not so much, such as the phrase 'In a snowglobe' in the above picture. To me, that's all part of the appeal. It's the noting down of thoughts, feelings, ideas.. then the excitement of rediscovering them days, weeks