Merry Christmas to you & yours

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.

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:

I know you're out there!

March is the month I start remembering what I planted last fall. I put spring on layaway and it's a pleasant surprise to know they'll soon be here. This year I should have new white tulips and some allium.

I'm also taking a new watercolor class so I'm experimenting with this new (to me) medium.

Weekly Sketches

This week's sketches inspired by the mini Boden catalog. I'm not sure why I get this catalog, but it's full of cute clothes and cute kids!

The Christmas rush

(c) 2012 katie lenius