Calendars, Planners, Doodles, and Painting

 Walking through the aisles at the stores, it is clear that “Back-to-School” time has come around again. Although there are no longer any back-to-school kids in my house ( thankfully at times especially during these sad and scary days of the increasingly dangerous spread of Covid and its variants ) for me it is still a new beginning of sorts. For me it is still a new beginning of sorts because it is the time of year when I again go down the back-to-school supplies aisles to get a new one of those many “planners” or organizing calendars that they sell this time of year. I am due for another one being that the calendars usually run from July to August of the following year. I love shopping through them since they come with all kinds of fancy organizing designs and layouts. My favorites are the ones that help you ‘color code’ to keep things organized.
 
When paging through my planner or calendar organizer from the past year, I came across this quick gel pen doodle that I had filled in on one of the many unused pages. It is not unusual for me to find unused planner pages as I tend to go with my own flow as life comes to me; and though I have usually taken pride in my organizational skills, I am pretty far from being a strict planner. On top of that, prior to my Covid vaccination shots this past Spring of 2021, organizing a busy calendar of events, plans, travel, etc. clearly wasn’t what life in this world called for or even allowed in some cases. So, needless to say, the pages unused for planning in recent times are many.  Now I am starting to think that with this new calendar I am going to need it more than ever as events get scheduled and then rescheduled again with the end of the summer once more bringing uncertainty on this earth.

Doodle on old calendar planner page:

​Actually, it is not unusual for me to find random doodles in notebooks of any kind; but when I came across the quick loose sketch in one of my actual sketchbooks pictured below, I remembered how seeing that loosely drawn sketch ( artwork that in general appears unfinished and a pretty lethargic effort ) had put the subject in my mind to doodle a similar posture again on one of my many doodled planner pages.

​Sketchbook page:

I believe that I did that quick sketch in my sketchbook a long time ago and first found the figure in an ad or something like that. It was interesting to me that I doodled the likeness twice, so I decided to give the subject and her posture more focus by creating a painting.  To expand on the canvas, I just thought up different elements and created a setting to place it.
 
The painting itself became inspiration for another series of painting ideas that I have had spinning in my head to do as a creative exercise. Those painting imaginings that I have can be part of an art project that I can ‘go-with-the-flow’ and plan to expand upon later.

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​Painting on 8 x 10 Canvas: