The London Eye

On The London Eye

I was in London earlier this year for a hen weekend and we went on the London Eye.  It's the first time I've been on it and it was nice to be up that high.  Here is a photo I took.  I thought it was pretty cool.

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Doodles: Love Think Give

 "Love More, Think More, Give More"

World of Journals www.mara-mi.com

Or so says my newest favourite notebook-slash-doodlebook.  

I possibly need to love more. And I can always do with giving more.  

I definitely do not need to think more. I'm an over-think-aholic and my mind needs a bit less chatter if anything. 

I actually bought the pad a few months ago in Spring and I add to it whenever I need to lull my brainwaves into a more calm state.  That is usually sometime at night after a particularly heavy day of interacting with excited children, stressed out adults, slow computers or internet overload.  To relieve the buzz in my brain I have to go back to basics. 

[Note of Interest: I've always found drawing repetitive patterns and lines quite relaxing.  My dad used to keep a pad of squared paper by the telephone in his office (he worked in design&engineering and had loads of cool layout pads & weird pens).  I would use the phone in his office when my friends rang as I knew the conversation would be a long one and the chair was comfy. It was padded and it swivelled. An hour or two later, I'd put the phone down and look at the pad and it would be covered with detailed repetitive doodles, key words from the various conversation topics & just a general mass of organised lines.  I've kept all these scribblings and it's fun to look back at them now and then and remember the school-girl crushes, topics of study and grievances - all revealed through these doodlings. See April 2010 Entry]

I digress. Back to Dotted Pad De-stress

  The exercise here was to simply draw some nice clean lines from one dot to another.  Aimless dot-to-dot. No '1,2,3, find the picture': no rules, no pressure. Just the ticket.  I normally have my lenses out when I do this and as I'm blind as a bat I have to have my nose almost touching the page to see what I'm doing(!). 

I was delighted to find, at the end of my first de-stress session that even giving no pre-conceived thought as to where my next line was going to go I'd look back at the page to find little characters and scenes jumping out through the lines.  I've shared some here.

A de-stress exercise with surprising results.

[N.B. I added the bull-face and cat whiskers after the characters revealed themselves.]

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Bouquet of Delights

For any of you who balk at the sight of fake-flower overload in your mum, aunty or nanna's house, here is a spot in the corner of the world where the abundance of bouquets-a-la-plastic actually look good.

A colourful sight in the streets of Old Rethymno Town in Crete.

Even the religious art push looked cool. 
[I don't say that a lot.]

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