I don’t really believe in making them.  I don’t.  I don’t believe in telling people some way in which you are going to revolutionise your life and then putting a deadline on it.  It makes you somehow accountable to them.  So that when you fail, you have to repeat it over and over again, to everyone you let in on your plan.  It rehearses your failure and reinforces it.

Or maybe it’s just me.

The simple answer of course, is to simply not tell anyone what your resolution is.

That being said, I am FINALLY back on track for the graphic design course I started nearly two years ago.  I started my new job at Glasgow Uni in October and have done next to nothing creative since then.  This week, I made the time to finish a unit on logo design and started a unit on packaging, which I had been putting off because it didn’t inspire me at all.

I really need to manage my time better.  At last count, I have FOUR paintings which need to be started.  I have the paint and the brushes, but space and time are at a premium in our wee flat.  Space, I can’t really do much about.  Time, on the other hand…  Over the Christmas holidays, I bought a total of about ten PC games on Steam.  I bought a similar number of books for my Kindle.  I mean, is The Complete D.R. and Quinch really essential to my life?  No.  But it’s so freaking funny.

So, I am not resolving to blog more often.  Or to lose weight.  Or to move house. Or finish my course.  Or do the paintings.  Or anything else.  Here’s a drawing of Poor Drummer Boy, who I resolved to turn into a comic strip about two years ago.  Ha!

Today I went shopping round all the charity shops in the west end with my lovely friend Lorna.  We pretty much exhausted them.  All of Dumbarton Road and then on to Byres Road.  Good times.  And I found these.

Yeah, I know.  More trees.

I think they’re brilliant.  The houses remind me of the film Paperhouse which I loved in the nineties (Young girl, ill at home.  Draws things that start to become real.  Big ol’ house).  Al was a little unconvinced, but hey!  The artist had for some reason glued pebbles on to the canvases,  which spoiled them to be honest.  Careful use of a craft knife and they’re gone.  I am now painting over the small gaps. (Okay, I admit my hand slipped on one of them and I put a hole in the canvas… Fixed as best I can)

No signature.  No idea who painted them.  But there’s Something About Them.  I lived in China for a while and all the foreign teachers had their scroll paintings of the four seasons bought from the night market in Chengdu. Maybe it’s that. But with added Paperhouse.

They were on sale in a charity shop in Partick and I got them for the price of £4.  Not each.  In total.  Made me sad that work (bad choice with pebbles notwithstanding) that is pleasing and has some merit (to me at least) was given to a charity shop and was sold on for next to nothing.

Admittedly, now that I’ve attacked them with a craft knife and patched with hastily applied acrylic, any worth they had might be somewhat dimished…