May to Juliana - content/process

 

Here is my version of Juliana's April design. I did a terrible job of replicating those little animals. Part of the reason was that I couldn't even figure out which animals the original ones represented. I shouldn't have looked so closely at them - and just guessed what they were and then done my own version. I doubt anyone is going to scrutinize how well I copied the stamp. Or - maybe Juliana will. Did you, Juliana?

I am not a fan of how the animals are in a perfect oval - concentric with the cartouche that goes around the name. Maybe I'll do more of these and get better at them. Maybe I'll refer back to Juliana's for a better selection of proportions.

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Yippee. It's still Mother's Day and I have filled up two weeks of blog posts so I can take a break after I finish this one. I said I would have more to say about: it's not the content, it's the process. I have no idea where I first heard about that. Whoever dished it up made it into something that really stuck in my head. I used it so much in teaching. It was not an easy concept to teach because people show up with their own ideas and notions and hard core beliefs. Why would they listen to me?

Maybe there are people who are drawn to experimentation. Maybe some of us truly enjoy figuring out problems. All I know is that if people will just dive in and try something and give it a chance, they might enjoy the experience. They might decide that they do not want to do it again. But, at least they will have tried. 

And that brings us to the quitters. For some people, they hardly give it a chance. That's fine. I imagine there were things I tried where I could have done a better job, but I gave up. In all my years of teaching, I only had a couple people who dropped out. It made me sad because I could see they both had talent and skills. Maybe that's why they dropped out. If they had already had a bunch of really good teachers, I might have seemed too different from what they liked. I, too, have had teachers that were not to my liking. But, I always stuck with it - and managed to find just one little thing lesson that I could use.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Big news tomorrow about stories.