Georg Wilhelm Stellar, a German naturalist, named half a dozen species on his 1741 voyage. Of those, only Stellar's Jay continues to thrive. The alpine area around Lake Tahoe is one of the places in Western North America where these birds thrive. They're ostentious, outgoing, and noisy birds. They beg for picnickers' lunch regularly. It's been fun hanging out with them these last six days in the lovely Tahoe basin. Cheers!
We visited Sand Harbor State Park on the Nevada (east) side of Lake Tahoe yesterday afternoon and I did this little watercolour sitting on a rock looking out onto a gorgeous beach. Ron spent his time wandering the pathways with the camera. It was a very quiet and relaxing time together. Ahhhhh, vacation!
My mom and dad sent me a beautiful tulip bouquet for my birthday. They were mostly ruffled pink tulip variety and I took some photos of them at their prime to use as painting reference. What caught my attention for this watercolour sketch was the purple spotted freesia. Anyhow, here's a pic of my work in progress so far.
Happy Monday :)
This experiment is watercolour paint on 300 lb watercolour paper. I wanted to see how well a mask from contact paper would work. Unfortunately, it didn't work quite so well as I had hoped. However, I later wetted the letters carefully, and included the areas where the paint bled out under the contact paper. Then I charged in watercolour paint and this is the result. I think I would be just as far ahead wetting one letter at a time freehand in script before charging in the watercolour paint. For reference, here's a photo of the letters and how they looked during my process this yesterday...
Step 1 - After the background wash
Step 2- cutting the letter mask. This was relatively easy for the block letters but script would be no picnic... and probably be less effective as the paint ran under the masks more on the curves.
Step3 - After I painted the masked letters. Messy bleeds around the first letters
Step 4 - after i expanded the letters to cover the bleeds...
Cheers!
I absolutely love sunsets, and love painting them too. Somehow I see watercolour as a more appropriate medium, since the sky is affected so much by water. Haha, yes, I do realize how crazy that sounds all you oil paint lovers!
Happy weekend!
Ron & I have decided to see some of the nearby sites after living here for 14 years. There are so many treasures within one hour drive of our home it's a new goal to see as many as we can now while the weather holds. It was a lovely day... bit windy but that was fine. We wandered around today and ended up in Bow Island Provincial Park in the northern part of Kananaskis Country. Featuring in this sketch are the Middle Lake Kettle, Mount Lawrence Grassi (far top right) and I'm working on names for the rest of the mountains... Google Earth, be good to me!
I had two purchasers for the lilies painting and so I set up another drawing, same size, same composition, and executed painting one more time. You can check back to July 21 and compare the two if you'd like. I like them both.... I certainly enjoyed painting this again. It's a fun, simple piece and fun to puddle on. My red and pink lilies bloomed last week - finally! I think there will be more lily paintings in my future.
Small, sunny yellow petunias don't seem quite as hardy and strong as their darker counterparts. I based this little painting on a pot in McLellan's garden where the little yellow guys were coming out a bit later, and were a bit smaller than the others. Even the tiny, feathery purple flowers (what are those anyway? are they baby ducks?)... were growing out over the little yellow pets.
This painting features Mount Brett on the left and behind her Mount Bourgeau. I just can't say enough about my day in the mountains. Here's the story...
It's been a busy day today so I'm opting to post a painting "new" to my blog but painted late last fall.
Late this afternoon I was driving home from a meeting that I found very... long. For some reason the memory of this "survivor" tree came to mind and I decided to make a quick painting of it for a bit of an outlet tonight. This particular tree grew way up high on the west coast of the west coast... Ucluelet, British Columbia to be exact. The winds howl, the rain beats down, and this little tree just goes about the business of growing. It's growing where it's planted... which is all we're asked to do. Often we don't chose the place and circumstances that we find ourselves in and we just have to do the best we can and keep growing. Painting this was a good little exercise for me tonight.
On our trip to St Albert last Friday I took quite a few photos of the landscapes, skies, even a train! For this painting I sketched a combination of the fields from one and the sky from another. These towering clouds had many hues including a deep blue, light red or pink and quite a bit of yellow. It was a glorious drive... good company, great scenery, the feeling of "getting away" to relax. This little painting is about (10"wx7"h)... and I'm not sure whether I'll do a larger one of this view... but hey, at least I painted some trees!
These amazing lilies are just a small selection from a huge clump of Tiger lilies in McLellan’s garden. There were 38 buds and 10 open lilies the day I took this photo. Wow! These lilies remind me of one Christ’s great lessons – one I can certainly put into practice this week. Could the biblical “lilies of the field” have been tigers? Jesus taught us that the Father clothed the lilies of the field more luxuriously than King Solomon. We are not to worry about material things because He cares more for us than lilies that are here today and gone tomorrow. If you’d like to read the complete passage click here. 
The painting of the sheep is done... for now. I’ll be tweaking a few things on this painting before I sign it. This is normal for me – most of my paintings are at about 90% done when I park them on the wall or my table. If I knew what I wanted to do it would be simple. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll know, but probably not. I used to push until I finished TOTALLY – something I learned to do as an accountant. But, I don’t have to do that with paintings. I can let the back of my brain think about this while I do something else. This has been a huge learning for me – it’s true about paintings (for me anyways) and it’s true about life. I’m much more relaxed knowing that everything does not have to be finished today. And it’s a good thing too because sometimes life isn’t predictable, is it?
attitude. I had a hard time with this concept (maybe just me?). It’s as simple as this: the leaves on the left are positive and those on the right are negative. I painted the left leaves positively. Those on the right I painted around and I defined them by what I left white. We end up painting around lots of things to make them show up. Today I painted around grass and around sheep. I also dry brushed (dry paint onto dry paper) some grass areas in front of the sheep. And, that’s a wrap... I'll be sure to post the absolute final painting... but now I must get back to trees.
And now... the sheep. As discussed yesterday I reworked the top right section and I like it quite a bit better now. In order to clean off the mess I made yesterday I wet the area I wanted to lift with clear water and then I took my dampened elephant ear sponge and gently agitated the paint until most of it lifted. I did a couple of rinse/repeats and by then I had removed the amount of paint I wanted from the paper. In this case it wasn't necessary (or possible) to lift all the paint... leaving the faint stains provides an underpainting and hasn't detracted from that area (IMO). I let that dry while I had another rest (back trouble, long story).
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