What Hobbies do you do now ?

Yvonne Smith

Yvonne Smith

Greeter
Staff member
For most of my life, i was an outside type of person , I lived in the country and had pets and livestock. Riding my horse was my favorite hobby, but I also just enjoyed working in the yard and garden, training my llama, and taking care of the other animals that i had.
Now, we live in town, I have a small older dog (Marco Poodle), and the cats that adopted us.

In the spring and fall when the weather is nice, I enjoy being outside and doing things in the yard and garden; but during the really hot part of summer, and the cold part of winter, I am pretty much just stuck in the house.
I do read a lot, and sometimes knot socks or crochet the small throw rugs, but not much else anymore.

I do enjoy artwork, but my drawing ability is not so great now either, so I have an app on my iPad called Pigment, and it has all kinds of pictures to color. Some are easy and some are more difficult, so I can pick whatever I feel like doing, but I find it relaxing, especially at night before bed.
Reading a murder mystery before bed does not work well for me, so for the last hour or so before bedtime, I either read some kind of non-fiction book to learn something, or I color with my pigment app.

Pigment only works with an iPad, but there are lots of other online coloring apps that can work with other tablets or laptops. Does anyone else enjoy artwork , or what do you do as a hobby now ?


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I tend to get hooked on something and run it into the ground. I've had a lot of hobbies over the years, beginning with macrame' in the 1970's. I've done crochet and tried to knit, needlepoint, made stained glass, sewed a lot of stuff especially when my kids were little, done a lot of gardening and fooling with various tropical plants, dabbled in baking artisan breads and other kitchen-related things, tried my hand at fermenting, dehydrating, and canning food, etc.

Most recently I had an obsession that many of you witnessed on SOC1 with hydroponics and Aerogardens. I have grown everything from kitchen herbs to eggplants in my dining room downstairs, sometimes with as many as 30+ Aerogardens with active grows going at once. I joked that the room looked like a landing strip at a major airport with all the lights on those gardens. It was fun and interesting for several years, but finally got to be more of a full time job keeping up so many active machines, watering, feeding, trimming, etc. I have shut down and purged most of the machines and still working on getting the dining room back to being a dining room. Currently I have 2 active Aerogardens with cherry tomatoes and one with varieties of romaine lettuce.

My one constant love is books. I've been a reader since I learned how and will read until I'm no longer able.
 
I used to love to read and sew but my eyes reached a point where they couldn’t do either. I still do online crosswords and solitaire.

The real hobby love of my life is my horses.

@Yvonne Smith I tried coloring. The simplest of pictures. Not only do I not have the patience for something that easy, my hands shake . I can medicate and bandage a punctured artery and trim a frog to perfection, but I cannot stay inside the lines of a picture a ten year old could color with ease.

Please share what you create as your work is amazing🤠🤠
 
Connie Bennett said:
I used to love to read and sew but my eyes reached a point where they couldn’t do either. I still do online crosswords and solitaire.

The real hobby love of my life is my horses.

@Yvonne Smith I tried coloring. The simplest of pictures. Not only do I not have the patience for something that easy, my hands shake . I can medicate and bandage a punctured artery and trim a frog to perfection, but I cannot stay inside the lines of a picture a ten year old could color with ease.

Please share what you create as your work is amazing🤠🤠
Click to expand...
Pigment has pictures with lines, and it automatically keep you in the lines when you color. If you color something different than you intended to, you just color over it the way you wanted it to be. You can also use the “undo” option, and take away a mistake with just a touch of the button.
Another thing that I like is they have both a paintbrush option, where you can color with whatever brush and texture you want, and then they have the bucket fill option. The fill option will automatically fill in a whole section with just a touch.

I usually do that to start. I just pick a color (say green for leaves) and then I touch each leaf and it is turned green. I do that with each part of the picture and then I can see the whole thing in basic colors.
After that, I use the brush option and add shading where I want it, but the colors always stay inside the lines.

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This is a picture i just colored a few days ago. One click turned the whole background the dark color, with a fade that made it darker at the bottom.
Then, I used the bucket fill for each each part of the rose with a dark pink base color and each leaf with a green color, and the inside of the dome with a very pale pink color, and everything had a basic color.

After that I used the brush option, and crayon tool, and added shading and highlights to the roses and the leaves. Then, I used the charcoal tool with a light pink for the light colors at the bottom, and a light grey one inside of the dome. Then I chose to have the outline in a dark rose color instead of black, which is why you can see the leaves and dome outlined in that color.
Pigment has so many ways to color that you can do things really simply or add more with the many options they have to use for brushes and colors.
 
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Here is an example of a picture that I am just starting, @Connie Bennett . I am using the bucket fill with a shading option, and as I touch each petal, it fills it in with color and shading.
You can see that it only fills inside of the lines, and at the bottom are the colors in the palette that I am using right now.

Once I have all of the flowers and leaves colored in, I will add a fill for the background. I am thinking that i will use one that looks like an old brick wall, and then age it using the charcoal tool. Then, I will use paintbrush, maybe oil paint, and add more shading and highlights to the daffodils and leaves.

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@Yvonne Smith. You have an incredible gift.

You could make decent money by printing your art on a good commercial printer, Using a good (and proper) commercial paper.

You could set up a vendor booth at certain events and I can pretty much bet you would sell out and have orders.

For example The Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration begins August 26th. It’s the year end show to crown the world grand champion.

The Arabian year end nationals are in Tulsa, OK this year. Their spring kickoff show is held in Scottsdale, AZ


The horse folks come with money and credit cards.

There are custom car shows and craft shows everywhere. Your work is so good, these folks will find a way to buy something on site, if you have what appeals to them.

Maybe you could advertise somewhere safe on line.

You could really make some extra cash with your talent🤠🤠
 
I am not actually drawing anything, @Connie Bennett . I am just coloring pictures with an online app nowadays. I have mostly lost my actual drawing ability over the years because of not using it, but I have been doing the online coloring with Pigment since 2024, and I find it to be relaxing and fun.
 
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