A Starry Sky and Painted Leaves

This is what's on my desk this week.......

My starry night sky landscape is a practice piece for a Craftsy tutorial I'm working on. I'm using salt and rubbing alcohol on top of the watercolor paint to create texture. Fun stuff!

And the watercolor leaf painting was a spur of the moment idea.  I was feeling the purples and oranges here and I love how the colors all worked out.  I framed it in one of my freshly painted blue frames and hung it up in the guest room :)

What are you working on this week?

Photos of the Week

Fall has the best color of the year.  It takes the cake! This is the view from the school that I get to marvel at when I drop my son off for the day. Please note that no editing was used on these photos.  These are the real deal.... the real colors with real intensity. 

And these beauties are my purple asters growing in my front yard.  I don't know why I didn't try planting these earlier!

It's on bad-headache-days like today that I really appreciate the beauty of my little world.  I don't have to go far to enjoy it. Even if I have to spend most of my day in bed, I can get up once in a while, walk to the front porch, and smile.

Fall Forest Landscape

The leaves have changed in the mountains here and it's gotten me in the mood to paint some fall forest scenes!

I've got a lot to improve in the landscape department, but this, I feel, is a good start. My painting doesn't look much like the photo I painted from either.  I have a more loose style.  I guess I've never been into photo-realism.  I figure, you can use a camera for that.   For painting, I like to use looser, more intuitive strokes with feeling!

Photos of the Week

Another adventure to a local waterfall.  Battle Creek Falls in Pleasant Grove is a beautiful hike!

The fall colors were showing here and there and it was actually cold! We aren't quite ready to pack our shorts up for the winter, so that was a shock to us.

How lucky we feel that we have all these amazing hikes so close to us! You don't have to go to Disneyland (all though, that's pretty awesome too) or even the National Parks.  You can explore your own backyard and have a lovely time.  Just remember to bring a jacket!

Green Cactus Paintings

My love of painting cactus continues.............

I've been trying out different methods of painting these prickly plants.  My favorite is still the loose, less realistic style. I could paint millions of these because they are so fun and free, but I stopped at about five because one can only have so many cactus paintings around!  

Photos of the Week

Good beautiful day from the land of the lake!

I have family in town this week for the arrival of my new nephew! New babies are so special and I feel so blessed to be an aunt as well as a mother.  

This morning I took my youngest sister out for a walk by the lake.  She lives far away in Arizona so I don't get much one-on-one time with her.  We had the best time talking about hang gliders and kites and enjoying the best weather of the year. I just know that deep down, my little sis has an adventurer in her!

As we sat throwing rocks into a somewhat slimy lake, we found a friend sitting patiently right next to us. 

Some days are just blessed and this has been one of those days.  Hope your day is blessed too!

Photographing Pears

Mmmmmmmm............pears!

My little family went fruit picking a few weeks ago and while we didn't actually pick these pears, we still obtained them from a farm.  (We picked peaches from the orchards because that's what was ripe at the time.)

In the past I've written a lot about painting pears; how I love their shapes and frequently buy pears just so I can paint them.  I even wrote two watercolor pear tutorials: one for painting a realistic pear still life and one for painting a pear silhouette.  It's a fruit I've always been in love with but hadn't spent much time photographing until now.  

Turns out, they are just about as fun to photograph as they are to paint!  I placed these pears on a tray near my kitchen window and shot away with my camera, trying all kinds of configurations.  I love how photography allows me to play with compositions so easily.

I'm thinking all of these shots would make awesome oil paintings one day!  I just need to get into oils again- it's been too long.