Background Music

As I sit at my computer on this quiet Sunday evening the music of our woods drifts through an open window.  The nightly symphony started a few hours ago...tree frogs, crickets and even a few distant coyotes sing their hearts out as the world slows to the deep steady rhythm of night.  

A song of peace and contentment floats through our little house and laughter rings out as we spend the last few moments of this lovely weekend together.  

Tomorrow life will swell to a full crescendo as the busy week gets underway.  (The anticipation of it all inspired the background of today's play with color and line.)  For now, though, the melody I hear is quiet and sweet... like a love song you never get tired of hearing. 

What about your world as it is right now?  If you get still and really listen what songs do you hear playing in the background?  What is the soundtrack to your life?

Linking up today with:

Creative Every Day

Greetings from The Zone

Just a bit of fun today, playing with sketches created while studying sweet peppers last week...  

These scanned pages from my sketchbook are a little fuzzy but, as you'll see, they were just the jumping off point for today's play on my laptop.

First I chopped the composition up digitally and rearranged the peppers as I thought they might look more interesting stacked.

I traced over the drawings with the artistic media tool, trying to keep the organic feel of the pencil sketch.  

Time for a little color...yellow, red and purple, just like the peppers I'm growing (or at least attempting to grow) in my garden!

The finishing touches: a few shadows and a little tone for the background.

Each pepper was created in layers so I can easily change its color, remove the shadows, etc.  With the base images complete it was time to have some fun!

And one more just for Creative Tuesdays.  The theme is (you guessed it!) striped...

Art is such a good friend to me.  I had a lot on my mind today but decided to take creativity by the hand and lose myself in form, color, and possibility.  We had a nice conversation, my art and I, as we spent time "in the zone". 

I wonder if in a few years when my nest is empty I'll just get completely lost in it all.  I think I could really get into the role of eccentric artist-recluse, maybe even wear a monk's habit as Gustav Klimt did...any idea where I could find one?  I think it would be fab.  The huz could just throw me a morsel once in a while and turn the light out when I doze off.  I'm sure he'd just love that.

People will wonder what I'm up to out here in my little house in the woods. When I do emerge everyone will be shocked at my other-worldliness.  Birds will light on my shoulders and deer will eat from my hands.  Maybe I'll be a little wild-eyed...that will surely add a bit of mystery! 

This day, though, I'll be lost in laundry and errands and the super-great jewelry project I'm going to share with you soon.  No monk's habit for me, but maybe I'll cast a few wild-eyed glances now and again, just to keep things interesting ;-)

Linking up today with:

Creative Every Day and Creative Tuesdays

Pepper Talk

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness;

it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

Gertrude Jekyll

Remember the pepper plants I shared about in this post a few weeks ago?

Good news!  They're alive and thriving!

Yay Edmund, for not pulling the baby plants up again!

And yay, Kera, for letting me know when Edmund starts to get out of line.

Can't wait to see this for real!

Some years I get around to planting a few things, some years I don't.  This year I was a little ambitious and put in tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, yellow squash, and four colors of sweet peppers: green, red, yellow and purple...all good veggies to grow in Texas. 

I am most excited about the purple peppers...they'll be so fun to paint (and eat)!  For now I'm making do with green ones from the grocery store.  I love their roundness and their smooth, shiny skin.

No gardening on the calendar for the next few days, though.  I'm spending time with the fam over the weekend so I'll have to catch up next week. I still have a bunch of annuals to put out.  They were so pretty at the plant nursery I just couldn't say no.  I'm a sucker for spring blooms.

Enjoy your weekend, my friends!

Linking up today with:

Paint Party Friday and Sunday Sketches

Feet Propped Up

In relaxation mode, feet propped up, doing some simple drawings to share with Sunday Sketches.

Concentrating on looking more at the subject and less at my marks.  I like the energy this brings to a piece and it helps me draw more of what I see instead of what I think I see.







I didn't even think of using these gardening gloves today.  There was too much loveliness to enjoy instead...sunshine, good food and plenty of laughter.  Not to worry... I'm quite sure those weeds will still be there tomorrow.

I hope you had a great Sunday afternoon as well.  It's going to be a beautiful week!

Sharing today with:

Sunday Sketches

Do It!

Just a thought for this beautiful day...

Face your fear, push through resistance, and get it done.  You know deep down what your heart is telling you to do.  Be brave and do it!

I haven't yet figured out how to share pdf's with you here, but feel free to save the image below for personal use as a coloring page.  Enjoy!

Linking up today with:

Creative Every Day

Planting Day

It was planting day in the garden yesterday.

Everything is in with only one small mishap.

Apparently Edmund the Dachshund likes the taste of peat pots...you know, the ones veggie plants come in when you buy them from the nursery?

Fortunately for Edmund the seedlings survived and I have a real weakness for his big brown eyes.

Honestly...could you be mad at that face?

Linking up today with:

Sunday Sketches

Chop Chop!

Good grief, my house is a wreck.  (Of course messy house usually means happy creative me.)  Watercolors and gesso are still sloshing about after Wednesday's abstract flower project.  I'm experimenting with gesso as a sort of "blending agent", giving watercolor pigments a different quality and moving them about the page.   Everything dries fairly quickly so I have to work fast, which helps me get out of my head a little more.

I

The result  is quite soft and painterly if you don't overdo it.  (Overdoing it results in mud.)

After stepping back from this page I wasn't crazy about the composition, so I chopped the whole thing up!  (Thought I might use the happy bits for Artist Trading Cards.)  It turns out the pieces made a nice mosaic.  Wouldn't this be a pretty grouping of hand painted tiles?  I'm not sure if that's possible...it's just a thought.

In other news... 

(a random fact about my life)...

I must have been in a choppin' kind of mood yesterday because on a whim I got eight inches of hair cut off!  No one's around to take my picture this morning so I took a goofy self portrait to show you.  I am a new woman!  

This weekend is shaping up to be a fun one.  The weather should be just about perfect for the Art Walk in town and lots of gardening will happen at our place.  I want to plant plenty of pretty things to sketch and paint over the summer.  Anything fun going on at your place this weekend?  I hope it's a good one!

Linking up today with: 

Paint Party Friday

Abstract Flowers

Hooray for generous artists who put together and post beautiful tutorials!  I had some fun today with this great method of painting abstract flowers by Carla Sonheim. 

Carla's directions are very easy to follow and there is plenty of room to have fun and add your own creative flair.  It all begins with random splotches of watercolor.

Both ends of the paintbrush are used in the next part...one end to paint gesso circles and and the other to etch details.

Pencil lines and more gesso refine the images a bit.

I got caught in the flow and forgot to scan the next few steps, but Carla includes beautiful images with her tutorial.  In the end, everything is tied together with a sepia wash which is the perfect finishing touch.

I took off on my own at the end of the process, adding black and white marks for contrast.  Renegade that I am, I also ended up adding a little more watercolor on top of the gesso.  My flowers didn't look much like Carla's lovely originals but I think they make a happy little grouping and I have some new ideas to add to my creative toolbox.

Pulling images from random marks this way reminds me a little of the intuitive painting process I studied with Flora Bowley earlier this year.  It's fun to see how ideas and techniques evolve once they collide with all the other info swimming around in this brain of mine.  

Oh, and here's one more page I created today.  (I didn't add so much black and white to this one.)  The process could be a little addictive, I think.  It's very free and relaxing.

Be sure to check out the full tutorial posted on the Art of Silliness.  It is super easy to follow and plants plenty of seeds in the ol' imagination.  (seeds...flowers...get it?...BaHaHa!)  A big thank you also to Kristin Dudish of Art and Stuff.  She posted a tutorial try-out last week that encouraged me to give this a go and offers a place to link-up if you try it yourself.  Kristin is also one of the hosts of the very popular Paint Party Friday, so she's spreading blog love all over the place!

Let me know if you give this a try.  (Maybe you already have?)  I'd love to see what you've done!

Linking up today with:

Kristin Dudish...Art and Stuff, and Creative Every Day