April Showers

April is nearing it's close and the snow seems to have finally decided to rest up until November.  (Although, living in Western Pennsylvania, I have learned not to count snow out until after Easter...so there are still a couple days left for frozen precipitation.) 

Trees are tufted with green, daffodils are out in force, forsythia is flowering and my lawn is a velvety carpet of green.  

It is cold and rainy.  And though April showers are said to bring May flowers, another thing I have learned, living in Western Pennsylvania, is that April showers actually bring...May showers.  

But enough about the weather.  

If you have been here before, you may have noticed the spiffy and updated style of the site. When I started it a couple months ago, I was in the middle of graduation prep, and barely had time to get my site up, much less personalize it.  But now that I am out of school and unemployed, I have a little more free time, so I finally added my own logo in lieu of the canned header and switched up the background.  The changes don't end here...I'm planning to add custom headers to the different sections, once I know how (there's some CSS involved...the boyfriend and I plan to suss it out this weekend) and overall do a bit of housekeeping, but I finally feel a bit more like this is MY website, rather than simply a site I am camping out on.  

Life after school is strange.  I feel like I'm in a bit of limbo at the moment.  It took a a while to get used to the fact that I'm not going back...and then I DID go back, to meet with my careers counselor and hang around the library sending out resumes and researching jobs, which felt at the same time strange and utterly familiar...I think it feeling strange was the strangest, as I've only been gone a month.  

Obviously, I've not yet been hired, but I have been reassured that it is simply a process and that I'm going about it right in sending out resumes and researching career paths.  

To date, I have had two interviews; one with a small start-up apps developer that, despite some cool projects also had some big limitations and wasn't right for me, and with a small local classified paper, which is nearby, but at which I would be producing a whole classified newspaper on my own, rather than having the guidance of more experienced team members.  

I have had a couple of freelance opportunities that might be very cool, and other than that, have just been trying to get my skill in illustration up to where I want it to be. (Does it ever get there?  It doesn't, does it...I see a lifelong quest ahead.). 

One of the paths towards improvement I have been traversing is that I started doing my 'Drawing a Day' again.  I started off about a week and a half after graduation and, after finishing my illustrated 'children's book' my circuit were still pretty fried, so I spent a week putting out art that I mostly hated, but slowly slowly, my systems are starting to come back on line.  Here are a couple that I have kind of liked:  

I also got directed to some awesome free PDF downloads of some fabulous Andrew Loomis art books that I have only glanced through so far, but even that little snippet set my mind spinning.  

Other than that, I have been trying to let my creativity choose the outlets and inspiration it wants.  I've been baking...I am bound and determined to make Parisian Macaroons at some point soon...I've been gardening and hoping my tomatoes survive to bear fruit this time around...I've been trying to watch and read things that fill my mind with wonder and awesomeness, and am finally getting off my butt to work on stuff that needs working on.  

Until next time, stay classy, internet.