Austen on my mind

Every so often I get in a Jane Austen kind of mood. Sometimes I re-read her novels, often I just overdose on BBC Jane Austen movies. I really love them. In another life I spend my afternoons in empire-waisted dresses, picking flowers from the sunny gardens of my home in the English countryside. Don't you?

Again, I've been playing around with different textures and brushes in Photoshop, using a pencil sketch as the starting point.

Pep Talk

It's going to snow . . . again. Who needs a PEP TALK? I do.

Boston

As I was watching the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, they kept playing the footage they had of the first explosion over and over and over. At some point I noticed that a small bouquet of yellow balloons rises into the air seconds after the smoke erupts - did you see that? It was an image that stayed with me, so I did a watercolor painting of it. 

Such a senseless act. I've only ever been a spectator at marathons but they are such a warm and, for lack of a better word, triumphant place. Hundreds or thousands of people run past you, mostly strangers, and you cheer and you cheer and you cheer. It's such an obvious testament to the human spirit, pushing through pain and distance to finish your race. Maybe that's what the balloons make me think of.

Ready for Adventure

One of the things I love about kids is their ability to turn just about anything into an adventure. We walk around a little lake in our neighborhood all the time and the kids love to collect sticks and rocks, and hunt for monarch caterpillars. They catch bugs and frogs in the backyard all summer long. So today I sketched up some of the things we use to "go adventuring" around here and played with it on this chalkboard background in Photoshop. Now if only the snow would melt so we could get started!

In progress

The Garden

I'm finally starting to gear up for the garden this year. I'm always rather done with my garden come September, which is why it's good I live in one of those 4 season kind of climates. But by this time of year I've had a nice long break over the winter and I start to daydream about tomatoes and snacking on fresh sugar snap peas. Every year I make a little "map" of our kitchen garden so I can plan out where everything goes, hopefully make room for everything, and remember to rotate the things that prefer to be rotated. Usually these plans are just a quick outline of the garden with names of vegetables and flowers scribbled in, but sometimes my daughters and I come up with a more creative version. This year I did an ink and watercolor painting of some of the usual suspects in our garden. This is it below with some added texture from Photoshop.

And just because right now it's so gross outside here, it's nice for me to remember that this is coming:

Dabbling in watercolor

I'll admit, I used to think of watercolor as kind of a "wimpy" medium. All ho-hum, take a nap, landscapes and vases of flowers. Lately though I've started noticing (I say this with full knowledge I'm - like with most things- behind the curve on this) some really interesting work being done with watercolor. Stuff that doesn't at all feel like something an old lady does in her spare time - apologies to the old lady watercolorists. There are some beautiful paintings and multi-medium pieces out there (I'm loving EvaJuliet Atelier, Amy Borrell, and Geninne Zlatkis) but watercolor isn't just showing up on paper, it's on throw pillows, scarves, dresses, shoes, everywhere! Here are a few things I've found while scouting the web:

1. Amy Borell print.

2. Placemat found on target.com

3. Dress from Modcloth.

4. Palette pillow from CB2 (no longer available).

5. Dinnerware from Target.

6. Shawl by artist Virginia Johnson.

So while I've been re-discovering my "art habit," I started giving watercolor the eye. I never paid much attention to it before but I find myself drawn to it now for a lot of reasons: the loose, translucent quality you can achieve and let's face it, it's less messy than other methods of painting and I can move it to and from my kitchen table (a.k.a. art studio) rather easily. I'm really liking adding a little watercolor to my drawings. I recently took an online watercolor class with Nicole's Classes, which was great because it "forced" me to spend some time with watercolor and actually complete some paintings. I need a little motivation most of the time. Below you'll see a few of the paintings I did. I'm liking it, I think I'll keep the ol' watercolors around.