I ought to be good at this. Archery was the one sport involving interaction with a projectile at which, surprisingly, I excelled in school. I realized that my arrow consistently hit the target about 8" off-centre towards the 4 o'clock position -- so all I had to do was aim consistently for 8" off-centre towards the 10 o'clock position and -- bull's eye! There's a lesson here, I'm sure, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Meanwhile, at The Zodiac Cafe, it's been time for the arrival of Sagittarius -- a female archer, in keeping with my plan to alternate guys and gals in the series. I flipped through some old sketches as I reviewed Manly P. Hall's typical characteristics of the sign:--
"Head long, forehead high and well-rounded; eyes dreamy; nose long; lips somewhat full; hair sometimes auburn."
Maybe this was my opportunity to re-do a painting from exactly a year ago -- "Ringlets," the first in my Denizens Series.
I've been gradually painting over some of the Denizens, and I *have* improved somewhat in the past year...haven't I? So I decided to work on adjusting her features to accord with Hall's description and give her another try.
Except:-- That nose. Those lips. She really didn't look like anyone I wanted to have coffee with. And I should have known; I've always heard that renovating is harder than starting from scratch. So I started from scratch.
I hadn't considered, though, what it would mean to work directly on my last sheet of a delicious textured paper that's really meant for mixed media. It was like painting on a dry sponge. Usually when I finish a painting, I like to bring it upstairs from the studio and hang out with it for a while, liking the good parts and thinking over the bad parts.
Neither of these gals did I feel like hanging out with.
What to do? I didn't want to cast off Sagittarius completely. Its related painting from my long-ago "Astrological Plants" series is one of my favourites -- and my backyard bush, just two years old, has produced a few snowberries this year, blooming right now.
One evening, still undecided, I worked on the mindless task of filing and paper shredding. Remembering how much fun I'd once had collaging a figure from the scraps of patterned paper from inside security envelopes, I did an updated model. I had fewer designs now, with so many transactions on-line. Her pendant even says, "Go paperless."
From this repetitive task came the solution to my unattractive Sagittarians. Just as a mask has covered the healing scar on my nose, so too a mask could cover the nose and lips I just couldn't get right.
