Totally Just Goofing Around

The prodigal pear
...leaving the "pearants" behind...

Hope you all have had a wonderful weekend!

Shadow Shot Days Ago

I'm glad I got out last Sunday afternoon and did some shadow shooting, because we "ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when.* "

Want to see more sunshine and cheery shadows? (With all this rain I sure do!) Go visit Hey Harriet! and see what other Sunday Shadow Shooters have found. And if you like to play with a camera, why not join in? Come on. You know you want to.

*Okay, well, actually since sometime mid-afternoon on Monday, but that isn't near as musical or poetic.

Farmville

A little sketchie of a farm in the Midwest done on a small piece of illustration board.* This worked nicely to hold in my lap or on the sketchbook and took layers of paint and ink and pencil and whatever I threw at it pretty well, as long as there wasn't too much wetness all at once. I like the idea of using the illustration board to supplement the paper in the sketchbook, and just know that it would "travel well."

And now I'm fighting my old computer, which is hooked up to my wonderful scanner. At one time neither the scanner nor the favorite printer would work with Vista (when Vista first came out), so I've kept them attached to the poor tired old computer which runs XP. What will I do when it dies, as it seems determined to do before the year is out??? I guess I'll be spending hours researching whether or not they've come up with Vista compatible drivers for my favorite peripherals! Do the rest of you also have to think hard to remember if all this technology really makes life easier or not?

Anyway -- I got this one scanned, and then the connection died again. Not the best in the lot, but the computer is flickering now, so I'm posting this anyway since it may be a while before I get the scanner working again. Sigh. More to come later. Hopefully. Meanwhile, I promise ... I'm still painting and sketching!
:-)

*Several experiments on larger pieces of the board were total flops -- I paint way too wet!

Shadow Shot Together

At the end of summer. How many more days at the lake?

See MORE shadow shots over at Hey Harriet!

9 11

I remember.

Shadow Shot Mushrooms and Mosses

Hey! It is Shadow Shot Sunday again already.

Mushrooms and mosses and lichens in the woods in Ontario. Visit the other Shadow Shooters at Hey, Harriet! and see what they've been up to.

*Note -- yep, in the "self portrait" shadow I'm still wearing the life jacket, even though we're in the woods. We'd just pulled the boat up to the shore, and I didn't walk far in, and the life jacket just stayed on. I felt like I was crushing the growth underfoot, and couldn't imagine how long it had taken for those tiny plants to grow that thick and deep.

Shade of Grey Day

A snippet from my travel sketchbook* of a grey day on vacation. I "broke the rules" and painted almost entirely with BLACK gouache. In the one square on the page I finished up with a few swipes of color.

Why have black and grey pigments gotten such a bad rap? Okay, so I see where people could (and do) over use them and end up with flat blah paintings ... but here and there ought to be okay. And, hey. Sometimes the world IS flat and blah and grey. Except for one red fishing boat. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about.

(Here's the other 3/4 of the page. Undecipherable, unless you know in advance that it is of a foggy, rainy, grey day on a lake... )
:-)

* my travel sketchbook is handmade from #140 hot press watercolor paper in a horizontal landscape format. We had to do all we could to avoid excess weight on this trip -- a good idea for any trip, actually -- so I chose to leave it unfinished with plans to do the covers after we returned home. I tried a new binding (to me) and feel like there are some technical issues with the construction of the book; therefore, I'm putting the covers on hold until I can talk to my friend, Bob Meadows (Book-Binding-Bob!) for HELP. I also have much more tweaking of hasty sketches before it is ready to be called done. And, of course, there will be some watercolor work from photos, as I sit at my table in the heat and humidity and think about the north... sigh. Oh Bother! I need to get over it!
:-D