Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which A Mineral Was Painted
And A Story Is Told (Two Days Late)

On Tuesday, I told you all about my previous week, and uh... I may have mentioned something about my dad getting swarmed by ticks and then failed to follow up.

Sorry about that, guys! Totally slipped my mind with the rest of the tales!

So here's the Dad Vs Ticks story:

Once upon a time, my dad and I were both in the local community band. I backed out a few years ago because I didn't have any weekends off to do things with my friends or just to relax during the summer, but he has stuck with it, and he and his trumpet go every week from the first warm week in Spring to about the last warm week in Fall. On Sunday, they had a rehearsal, so he packed up his trumpet and headed out to the rehearsal space, which he explained to me as the middle of a parking lot. I've practiced in weirder spaces, so I buy it.

(lookin at you, weird, creepy, almost certainly haunted and fairly abandoned century-old community building in the middle of nowhere...)

So they're all set up in their chairs and playing along when my dad feels something crawling on his leg. It's summer, so it's bug season. He figured it was a fly or something equally benign, but looked down anyway (because what if it was a horsefly or a hornet?).

It was a big flat tick hook-handing its way up his leg.

Needless to say, he destroyed it by plucking it off the leg, putting it on the hot tar, and grinding a rock down on top of it. Then he told everyone why he was screwing a rock into the pavement and everyone started checking. A few more ticks were found and killed. Weird, since again, they were in the middle of a parking lot with no grass within ten feet.

Here's where it gets really upsetting, though.

They go through a few more pieces of music - practice, practice, practice - and then my dad feels a lot of tickling on his legs. Big whoop, everyone feels the crawlies after finding a tick, right?

Wrong.

There were dozens of ticks swarming the band, and he kept having to brush them off of himself.

Think about that for a second!

They were in the center of a parking lot and being swarmed by dozens of ticks!

And of course the story doesn't end there, no. He was relating the tale to me because he stormed up the stairs, shirtless, asking me to check his back (thankfully tick-free). So we go downstairs to freak out about how bizarre the whole thing is and he stops mid-sentence, looking at the laundry basket over my shoulder.

One of the freaking jerks must've hidden in a pocket of his pants or something because it was crawling up the wallllllllllll!

No thank you.

We killed it very dead - just your standard dog tick, so not really a risk for Lyme (though it could carry other stuff I don't want!).

So that was my Sunday lol!

But you're not just here for the ticky followup to Tuesday, no.

You're here for art!

I didn't paint the tick. I did a bug last week.

Instead this week's topic was "Mineral", so I painted some emeralds!

"Emerald Cluster"; Watercolor on paper; 2022

That was a lot more fun than I thought it would be to paint! I drew it out with a green watercolor pencil and then filled things in slowly with the colors all going different directions like the inclusions and fractured planes that emerald crystals really have.

Lab created emeralds bother me with their purity. If I want a clear green stone, I'll get a locally mined tourmaline. I want my emeralds cloudy and preferably second-hand. I worked from a bunch of reference for this, and I'm actually pretty happy with how the weird purple rock came out. Believe it or not, that sucker was supposed to be a brownish gray, but I grabbed the wrong color and I really like the contrast!

Now you know the secret of the Tickpocalypse, and you've got a fun bunch of emeralds to look at! I think my work here is done til Monday!

Get out there and Enjoy Something!

FC