this august afternoon

Today was great... so relaxing. After spending the last two days packing and shipping orders from when I was away, I'm finally getting back into the swing of things. Mike and I woke up and went to Zoe's Kitchen in Cambridge for breakfast (brunch? lunch? It was 2pm... but we got eggs... so I dunno). Our friend introduced us to Zoe's a few weeks ago and now we can't get enough.

(I also can't get enough of waking up, having a cup of coffee and sometimes even going out to breakfast together before starting our days instead of me waking up at 6am to commute to work and Mike spending 3 hours a day on the train to and from work.)

He got the "Three Sons" breakfast, which has three of everything you could possibly offer in a breakfast, and is probably called that because you could feed three dudes with it. Or one Mike. I got the smoked salmon benedict, which is incredible and delicious and undeniable proof that you really can (and should) incorporate seafood into every meal possible :)

After breakfast I dropped him off at work and made the trek up to the huge art supply store in Somerville... it's only a little over 4 miles from our apartment but takes about 30 minutes in Boston traffic. I took some photos while I was sitting in traffic next to Faneuil Hall... but they're depressing.

Haul from the art store: Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso and Black Lava texture gel, some image transfer paper, as well as a couple palette knives and pads of ink.

All the walls of my studio are brick, including the little arched entranceway where this plant sent out some new leaves.

Mike's mom gave us this plant when we were living at his parents' house... I thought we killed it when we moved, but its slowly taking over the archway into my studio. I love plants and love the idea of them creeping all over our apartment. I'd live in Jumanji if it was possible.

I love it here.

A poem I wrote at the beach has been stuck on my inspiration board for a while, so I took a few lines of it and played around with some different lettering styles and colors on a smaller canvas. A couple other paintings have also been started this week, and the finishing touches on some overdue custom work done as well.

I've also been teaching myself to better use the manual settings on my camera... it's silly to own a nice DSLR and expensive lenses and rely on the auto settings all the time, so hopefully forcing myself to experiment and learn different techniques will help me become a better photographer and get more out of my photographs, and later my artwork. Baby steps though... I still carry around an ISO/aperture/shutter speed cheat sheet in my camera bag :)