koukla carolyn

Recently I’ve been living out of suitcases, or rather, my backpack and a canvas tote bag. Now that I’ve graduated from college I hope that those days have ended for the time being. I’m looking forward to having a more stable life—I hope.

I was in Hartford last week and I sat inside on the couch looking out the window. Lately I’ve been really inspired by Richard Bell of Wild West Yorkshire. I love the idea of doing nature sketching but I don’t like the idea of getting all wet and cold and muddy. I think this was the perfect alternative because I was nice and warm inside and I still had a perfect view of everything out there.
It was so windy that day and I had a lot of fun drawing these leaves fly all over the place. These were quick sketches and I didn’t use pencil underneath or anything like that. I’ve been trying to do a lot of sketching lately and it really relaxes me more than doing perfect little precise drawings. The only reason I’ve been drawing lately is to help me relax—I’ve been so busy lately with school and work and other kinds of “life” stuff. When I get stressed out, Jeet tells me “you haven’t been drawing lately.”

This is the first drawing I have made in awhile. I have just been so busy lately that I’ve forgotten about my art, which is discouraging for me. But soon I will be done with school and I am really looking forward to that. I did this sketch for the mother’s day card I made for my mom. I have some artificial sunflowers in my bedroom and I drew those because it has been raining way too much these days. Once it stops raining I hope to go outside and do some more sketches of real flowers.

I didn’t do much drawing at all last week. I had a couple of papers due—one of them was complicated and yucky to write and took me longer than expected. I made a few sketches though. I made this sketch of a tree on Tuesday before my History of Mongol and Turkish Empires class started. I needed to relax before that class starts because I always get stressed out with the complexity of it. I wanted to add in the foliage but I ran out of time and had to rush off to class. The second drawing is a closeup of a branch I made yesterday while waiting for my economics class to start. I was sitting on a stonewall and drawing this when my teacher came over and started smoking a cigarette. It was weird because I don’t like being watched by people I know and for some reason I didn’t expect my teacher to smoke. I’m not sure what kind of tree it was but it was covered with white flowers and the branches were contorted into all kinds of formations. The flowers kind of looked like dogwood, but I’m not sure. In any case, I’ve been drooling over this tree for the past two years because it is so beautiful. I also drew it here.

I drew this last week one night before I went to bed. During the week I sleep on the couch at my grandparent’s house and I had all my junk on the coffee table. I was reading Karl Marx for one of my history papers and I had all kinds of notes strewn about, as well as my water bottle and my purse. I was thinking of Everyday Matters Challenge #9 when I drew this. The topic was “organized chaos” and chaotic is definitely how I am feeling right now. I have a month left of school before I graduate and I still have a bunch of things to finish. To keep myself feeling sane, I have all my assignments on a big list and I cross things off as I complete them. At least then I feel like I’m accomplishing something.