Thursday, January 29, 2009


Those sideways "daisies" are actually Chrysanthemums, but they sure look like daisies to me. (I just spent about an hour trying to get blogger to put the image in horizontally - does anyone know why it insists on showing it sideways?). My friend Natalie brought them to our painting group today, and I painted them on wet hot pressed paper with watercolor and Karan d'ache watercolor crayons. I usually work from photos, but I couldn't resist these colorful, cheerful cut flowers on a cold, gray, icy day. 11x15

Marigolds

These marigolds were painted sometime in December, but I hadn't gotten around to posting them during all the Christmas festivities. I love their bright yellow faces!
Marigolds - 11x15 on Arches

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Another January Sketchcrawl




Yesterday was Sketchcrawl #21, and being January, it was COLD. There was still some isolated snow patches on the ground and they were predicting more snow later in the day. I went out early and did a sketch in my car of a path and some trees at our local park. While I was sketching it started to snow, and since I had to deliver a painting to a juried show after 12:00, I decided to go home and do that before the roads got bad. After dropping off the painting, I came home to get some lunch, intending to go out to sketch again afterwards. As I pulled into my driveway I decided to sketch the Christmas-light deer on my front lawn. By the time I finished with that, it was snowing really hard and sticking, so I cut my sketchcrawl short for the day. I am a real weenie about cold weather, and especially about driving in snow, so I'm pretty happy with getting in two actual outdoor sketches.
If anyone would like to know more about Sketchcrawl, and to see the sketches from around the world, you can find them here: http://www.sketchcrawl.com/