Nothing like a tight deadline to get the painting thing off to a good start!

Every year William Allen High School in Allentown, PA has a fundraising art show to raise money for the Allen Art Academy. The Academy is one of the BEST programs for nourishing and encouraging artistic development for teenagers, and allows them to have up to 3 hours every day of art classes. It’s a brilliant program.

For the show, local artists as well as former students are asked to donate an 8″ x 8″ work of art which will (hopefully) be sold at the end of the evening, with all proceeds to benefit the Academy.

This is my entry from last year, which I’m glad to note was sold!

This year I tried a few fall painting sketches, but nothing seemed to be clicking, and the deadline for sending was getting closer and closer, so I thought maybe something a bit more English might be a nice inclusion for the show (every year I’m thanked for making it an international event, which I think is very sweet.) I went back to some pictures from a great day out- a heritage day presented by TFL and the London Transport museum, where you could take a ride on their vintage tube trains! We got to travel on a gorgeous 1938 Northern Line Stock car, and took it up to Amersham (slightly inaccurate to have a Northern Line train on the Metropolitan line, but hey, it was nicer to see the countryside than the inside of the Northern line tunnels!)

Based on that photo, here’s how the painting developed. Watercolour and a hint of acrylic, with black india ink accents.

I was pleased with the end result, and even more pleased as I packed it up and marched it to the post office that I could still sneak it in before the deadline for the show – obviously it’s a bit tricky when you live overseas. You can imagine my surprise when the post office told me they couldn’t guarantee it reaching the US any time soon. WHAT? It’s 2012?!

I was kindly reminded that Hurricane Sandy is still massively disrupting most services across the East Coast, and that mail is hardly a priority. Oh good, so I might not get my painting for a good cause submitted in time, AND I didn’t think about the Hurricane that has taken away so many lives in the US. Bad person.

Lesson learned- stop procrastinating. Just because you THINK you have plenty of time, anything can happen that is completely out of your control, and as fun as it is to say ‘not my fault’ it’d be more fun to have done it right in the first place.

At least if the painting doesn’t make it to Allentown in time, it’ll be really early for next year, right?