What A View

This morning I stumbled across photos we'd taken last summer during some pretty incredible exploring down in Southern Oregon. Those layers of mountains just went on for days! Atmospheric perspective (how things farther away appear lighter, bluer, and less detailed) has always been one of my favorite things outdoors! I remembering explaining it to my husband when I was trying to paint something early in our marriage. He had seen it's affects plenty of times but had never really thought about how it actually looks bluer farther away. It blew his mind! Art student perk I guess! 😜  It just makes those grand mountaintop vistas so incredibly cool!

Sunday Afternoon Calm

We went on a little family walk around Cheadle Lake (in our small town) the other Sunday. The lake is looking unfortunately yucky this time of year and the bugs were out in number but the girls had a blast riding their little scooters along the path. And amusingly, we discovered that our dog is terrified of duck feathers. 😜  I think he just had no clue what to make of the smell? 

I did this quick sketch this morning remembering that although it wasn't a perfectly beautiful view, it was calm and relaxed and we were together. And that counts for something!

The Bold and The Beautiful

Tried something a little different here. I usually leave those white lines between my different color-shapes and had been wondering what it would look like if I filled them in with marker instead of just outlining with my thin-tipped pen. It's definitely bold, and very graphic. It wouldn't be the best choice for every picture but I do like it. New possibilities!

The Sand Beneath My Feet

I'm so glad we live in a place that's near the beach again (Instead of all land-locked in the northern Midwest). I have such wonderfully nostalgic memories of quick trips to the coast with cousins growing up. We'd run up over that little hill and were there! Sandcastle-making, burying feet, s'mores-making, kite-flying and shell-hunting galore! Such great times.

As the Sun Goes Down

And after those lazy afternoons, who doesn't love a good sunset? I especially love it when subtle rays shine through holes in the clouds. Kinda went for the idea of that here, but in a much more stylized manner. 

Drifting Off

So clearly I'm kinda stuck on the hot air balloon gig but it just hasn't run its course and I'm having a lot of fun and they're quick to do so I haven't even had the chance to get bored yet! Oh and I'm preparing to have an art booth at the Art and Air festival (there will be hot air balloons), which I'm super nervous about because I've never done it before. I just don't know what to expect but the good thing about it is that it's got me painting. And painting lots. And I love it.

Watercolor on paper 8x10

Photo credit: Tricia Anderson 

"Blowing Away" Time-lapse video

Oh, this video wasn't quite ready when I posted the picture the other day, so here it is now. And forgive the quirky angle, I write while laughing heartily at myself. I had no clue it would end up looking like I was painting on the ceiling when I filmed it like this. Live and learn they say ;) Hope you like it!

Spiraling Upward

I had so much fun playing with yesterday's hot air balloon, that I just had to do another. Might even make a series of it. Course I didn't want it to have the exact same look, so I tried to change up the magic a bit. I gave it a slightly different touch. What do you think? 

Photo credit: Linda Seavey

Blowing Away

Had a really, really bad day today. Like daughter-puked-in-the-car-after-driving-30-minutes-to-Costco-so-we-had-to-turn-around-and-drive-back-without-the-groceries bad. It's hard to come back from that. So I needed to paint badly, and to paint something fun. Never painted a hot air balloon before, but I'm going to have an art booth at an Art and Air festival in a month so I thought it might be fitting. But it was more technical than I'd realized, although I'm not sure why that came as a surprise. It's like I'm a complete idiot sometimes. Like I haven't been doing this for years and have no clue what it'll take to paint something. And as I finished, it was just kinda meh. But all along I had toyed with ideas of ways to somehow make it as magical as hot air balloons seem to be. And at the end, not loving the result, my husband said, "why not," when I told him what I was thinking and that's all I needed. Permission to play! And it suddenly wasn't boring anymore.

8x10 Watercolor on paper

Photo credit: Linda Seavey

Aquabord instruction Video - Tulips

After another go at the Ampersand Aquabord, I felt like I'd learned a couple of things so added my hints to the beginning of my time-lapse video in case they can help anybody else. I was a little worried - the painting went through a lot of stages of ugly along the way but pulled together at the end and now I kind of like it. Isn't it funny when that happens? That's why you can't give up early in the process, no matter how discouraging it may be! It's super helpful to have somebody nearby to remind you of this in case one of those "stages of ugly" make you forget. 

 Oh and another thing that is great about the Aquabord is how easy it it to lift color. It just comes right off! Hope you enjoy the video and please leave any suggestions if you have them!

Oh and they really are tulips as the title says, they're just super open with the petals about ready to fall off. Makes them look a lot less like tulips but also made the deep yellow a lot more visible. 

Tiny Columbine

So I'm not quite as thrilled at my second attempt on the Ampersand Aquaboard. It is just tricky. When I paint flowers I do a lot of controlled wet-into-wet where I wet one petal, then being the paint in and move it around and let it mix and the Claybord doesn't do that a ton. Then I come back in with layers on top of that when it dries, but on Claybord, that just lifts the color is already placed there. So I have to change my mindset when painting. Great it a bit like a different medium altogether. Relearn how to paint. 

And while I'm not head-over-heels for tonight's results, it was a good learning experience. Or at least that's what I always tell my students when they don't like their end product! No but seriously, these little 6x6 inch Aquaboard are the best time to practice.

Fun with Time-Lapse

So I got a crazy idea to try to take a time-lapse video of me painting. I went for something small and easy that didn't require as much thought. Funny thing, I felt a ton of stress doing it and like I had to keep moving and move quickly! Which is silly since the video thingy speeds it up for me. Although I wasn't the only one confused. My 4 year-old Grace watched the whole thing with a bewildered look, and just kept asking me how I moved so fast! Hahaha.

Lilies in the Park

Almost repeated the miracle of finishing a painting in a day! And honestly, I could force the issue and finish it now but I haven't decided what color the background should be and I don't want to do something I'll regret tomorrow.

 

I had planned on leaving it white but I started painting it at a park while my kids played and I was constantly distracted looking up to check on them and being bumped when my littlest finagled her way onto my lap and so I ended up with some splatters from my water cup. And once that same tiny girl accidentally grabbed a wet edge and smeared it so white is out. What to do instead...?

Rose-Needs-a-Name

Wahoo! I don't think I've ever completed a whole painting in one day. I'm trying to get a bunch of small (8x10) paintings done for a festival I'll be in at the end of August, and thought I'd see if I could complete one in a day. And I did! Not sure how many times I'll be able to repeat it but I did try to relax and just keep going instead of worrying about getting it perfect. I think sometimes we put this stress on ourselves to basically make every painting into a masterpiece and that's just silly. 

So it's not a masterpiece but it's done!

And I think that's enough sometimes too.