Time to Catch Up, Again

Posted on July 2, 2024 by SusanG

Yes, it’s been a while. I keep saying that I will get better at posting. And I always intend to and then something gets in the way. Usually, it’s me. So I won’t promise to get better, you’d rather see that than me keep saying it and not doing it. And since it has been a while I’ll try to bring you up to speed and maybe a little more. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and get comfortable.

First up. My day job decided to do another in person, all hands, department meeting this year. At one point they were going to do it in Nashville, which I thought would be really cool but they changed their minds and decided to do it in Orlando again. The best part about that was that I extended my stay and spent some time with my sister. The second best part was getting to see two rocket launches.

A very judgy duck at Disney Springs

A bit about the launches before I go on. I lived in the Orlando area during part of the Space Shuttle era. It was common place to drive out to the coast to watch a launch. It was also common to stop what we were doing during a day or evening and just watch it from an office window, a parking lot, or the driveway. Yes. You can see a launch from Orlando. Though they are much more spectacular from closer up, like from the space coast. 

So on this trip, after dinner the first night of the meeting, one group of people decided to go to over to the beach to watch the SpaceX Starlink launch. I didn’t go with them but a smaller group happen to be talking about it when I went down to the lounge area to hang out and they invited me to go. It had been so very long since I’d made that run out to the space coast. It was a lot of fun. We didn’t get the best viewing but we did end up just stopping on the side of the road to watch it, and listen to it, and feel it. That’s the really cool thing about watching a launch from the coast, you can hear it and feel the rumble as it comes across the water. It is really awesome. And the sight! Oh man. That is something else, especially at night. Those are the most exciting to see, the night launches. 

The second launch that we got to see was a bit of a crap shoot. We weren’t really sure whether it was going to go. It was the Boeing Starliner crewed mission. They had tried three or four times to get the thing off the pad and had to scrub it each time so we didn’t know for sure if we were going to get to see it. We were in a training class as part of the meeting when it was scheduled to go up. But we did get to see it. At just seconds before the launch we all marched to the other side of the building, we were on the 19th floor, and invaded a conference room and watched the launch. We mostly just saw the con trail through the clouds, which was just as exciting. 

We got wet. Very wet.

The time with my sister was a lot of fun. We got very wet at Disney Springs. No, it’s not a water park. It’s a shopping, dining, and entertainment area. We wanted street tacos and they have some really good ones there, and I wanted to pick up a couple of things from the Cirque du Soleil shop. It was a nice day when we got there. But then, as happens in Florida in the summer, the afternoon storm made a showing. We did get the tacos, but we were probably the last ones served because the storm. We made it to Cirque du Soleil after that. That was the first time we got wet. While we were in the shop things let up so we made our way back to the other end of the place to get a few other things. We were just ready to leave when the sky opened up and dumped buckets of water. We tried to wait it out but decided to make a run for it. And that’s when we got very very wet. Very wet. And yes, it was fun. You can’t really help but laugh in a situation like that. 

In addition to Disney Springs my sister and I also went to Seaworld. It had be years since I was last there. It was fun as always, though a bit hot. I might have whined about it a little. I like the heat but for some reason it was just kicking my butt. To the point that I thought the temperature in the Arctic exhibit was reasonable and comfortable. Still we had fun and she got some amazing Orca pictures from the show. We did spend a little time in her pool after that. And the next day. We made a point of choosing the hottest forecasted day to spend in her pool and my niece and her family joined us. That was a treat. My niece’s daughter has been very slow to warm up to me, not surprising I don’t see her but about once a year at the most. This time though, she is old enough to grasp the sibling concept a little, probably because she has a brother on the way, and she was able to relate that I am her Mommom’s sister. She wasn’t to keen to play with me in the pool but after swimming she got a little friendlier. It was a treat. 

Another treat was the trip to the art supply store. My preferred art supply store is Dick Blick, or Blick Arts. I can order online, but I do like to actually go to a store sometimes. Unfortunately the closest physical store to me is in Savannah, Georgia. But it turns out there is one in Tampa, Florida which is close enough to my sister that we decided to take a trip over to check it out. I did spend some money. I needed another suitcase. It was so cool. And since we weren’t too far from it, we made a visit to a park in Tarpon Springs. The park wasn’t what my sister was hoping for but it could be good during the school year when there might not be so many people. 

Once I got home from Florida, and got my world put back together, I finished up a couple of paintings that were close to being finished before the trip. I have a pastel painting of a group of tulips that I really only needed to sign and spray finish and now that’s done. Then there was the Rhino. That still needed some work, though not a lot so I got that done and then the final spray and sign. And that’s all the work that I was actively working on. 

Unfortunately, that means I’m now in that dreaded window of time when I have finished things but haven’t started anything else. This is my most frustrating time. I think I’ve said before that if I haven’t started a new piece by the time I finish one then it’s really hard for me to start the next piece. This time I’m running into trouble deciding what to work on. If I happen to decide I want to work on a particular thing then I start going back and forth in my head with what medium to use. It’s exasperating. And totally unproductive. 

It’s also probably a good thing. Because, when I’m going from one piece of art to another, I don’t do a lot of experimenting. Oh, I have, a little just not regularly. This gives me a little opportunity to experiment and play while I figure out what I want to create and how I want to do it.

Florida sky

The thing is, experimenting is important. It keeps things fresh. Experimenting can be trying a new medium, a new style, or even a new subject matter. By not trying them regularly, I can get stuck, or I get in my way and that slows things down. The way that can happen is if I have an idea that I think would look good a certain way but I don’t have a lot of practice or experience with doing it that way then I may not even try to tackle it because I don’t know how it’s going to work out because I’m not sure about how to do it, and several other reasons that go through my head and keep me from creating that idea. It can also get me stuck for creating a different idea because I can’t quite get past that one that I’m not sure how to make happen. It will sit there in the middle of the mental doorway and just barely budge if at all.

Fortunately my mental doorway is not currently blocked. I’m just dealing with the inertia that comes with completing a piece and not having something else ready right away. However. I do have some sketches that I’m working on and I’ve chosen a new piece to start. I hope to get that started in the next day or two. And I as I said, I am doing a little bit of experimenting which I’ll tell you about in another post because by now you’ve finished your cup of tea or coffee and probably need a bathroom break. 

Cheers!

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Oh! The Possibilities!

Posted on May 4, 2024 by SusanG

While I have that sentiment about many things, for this discussion, I’m talking about art. Specifically, I’m talking about all the possibilities for paintings. Which, a few months ago felt a little more constrained, or required a bit more calculation or engineering. You’re thinking, ‘what’? I know. Just hear me out.

Up until a month or two ago, I was planning on most of my art pieces being either some form of stippling or watercolor. I considered taking up painting in some other medium than watercolor but hadn’t quite committed to figuring out oils, or learning about gouache, or trying acrylics. All of those would require a fair bit of learning and maybe even dealing with the valley of suck. A place I didn’t feel I could spend too much time fighting my way out of. Last fall I happened to start a piece in pastel as an experiment. That piece turned out to be my painting A Cliff and the Southern Ocean. 

The experiment was to use soft pastel as a watercolor. The pastels I use are mostly pigment with little to no filler and so they dissolve nicely with water. I worked on the piece off and on for several months and tried to enjoy the messiness of working in pastel while definitely enjoying the vibrancy of the color. At the time I still had several other pieces I was working on or had planned so I didn’t think of it as anything other than an experiment. 

Then one day I read something about pastel and canvas. I don’t remember what or where it was, but it stuck in my brain. I had been using canvas board for the stippling paintings with the acrylic ink and since I was planning more of those, I had a few extra, unassigned canvas boards laying around. I also have some sanded gesso. I bought it a few years ago after working on a pastel painting for myself, but I hadn’t really used it. Since I didn’t think just a gessoed canvas board was going to be enough for the pastel to adhere to I decided to give the board a coat of the sanded gesso. 

Yes, this started as a squirrel. An idea that takes hold and distracts you from what you were doing. I’d ask for help cleaning the squirrels out of my place but honestly, I’ve become accustomed to them and would miss them terribly, so I just deal with them.

For that canvas board experiment, I chose a picture of some berries. I wanted something that would be interesting but not too intricate in its detail because I was trying something else new as well. I didn’t sketch it out in minute detail before I started on it, as I usually do. I tried blocking in the main parts with the idea of filling things out with the color as I ‘painted’ with the pastel. I started it and then got very involved in finishing some other pieces. By the time I got back to it I was rethinking the stippling and had done, what at the time, I thought was just going to be a sketch in pastel. I also happened to have a long weekend off from the day job. I chose to spend the weekend finishing several pieces of art that I had sitting around. The berries where just one of the pieces. At the time I was also in a bit of a quandary as I was starting to find that the stippling was really taking a toll on my eyes and my hand. 

As I worked on the berries with the rich color and the ease of covering a larger area and the mixing and even detail possibilities, I got really excited about the piece. This piece that started as an experiment. I used the picture because I thought it would be a good comparison later when I did it in watercolor. But here I was seeing it come together in pastel and just amazed and loving it. There are pieces that when I finish them and step back and look at them, I am amazed and sometimes dazed. It’s a feeling of pride, and humility because I’m a little stunned that I did that. The berries were that. And more.

I had not considered pastel as a main medium they were just a faster way than colored pencil and easier than watercolor for doing a larger piece of art in color and usually just for myself. And even at that, I keep buying more pastels. I even brought some back from Paris last year. Then, I finished the berries. I saw pastel as a possibility. I turned around and did the Silvertone Guitar in pastel, also on canvas board, instead of the acrylic ink stippling I had originally planned for it. I decided to do Fred the fish in pastel even while still working on a stippling version of it because I could see how vibrant I could get the color. 

Before, when I looked at a picture that I wanted to paint from I had to consider how I wanted to do it, watercolor or stippling. If it was stippling, I had to decide color or black and white, and how was I going to show the detail or make the subject stand out from the background if I wanted a background. Now when I look at a picture that I want to work from there is less thought of how I’m going to do it and if it’s possible to do it. I still have to decide between watercolor or pastel and size as well as surface, those decisions never go away. But now I just think of how cool it would look and is that what I want to work on right now. I’ve even gone back to some photos that I really like but had put aside because I couldn’t quite figure out how to do them. Now, I look at them and see them as possible. 

Sometimes it just takes finding the right tool, or medium, to open up a world of possibilities and the joy and excitement that brings. Do your remember being or watching kids in a toy store? How when they encounter all the different toys that are doors to different worlds of the imagination, you can see their eyes and brains glow. That’s what I find for myself now, with the current shift towards pastels. 

To be sure there are still things I’m working on and learning. Like choosing the right fixative. I had another artist on Instagram suggest a particular brand that doesn’t distort the pastels, so I am going to try that. The search for that fixative lead me to some others that I want to try as well. I’m also still working on what support I like best for pastels. I have a stack of the Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper so I’m using that for now as well as taking a better look at the sanded gesso on canvas board. And then there are the pastels themselves. Just as in other mediums you have variances that make one brand a favorite over another, the same in soft pastels where there is a variety of hardness and as well as pigments, color selection, shapes, quality, and if you want pastel pencils or just the sticks.

And even with that…Oh! The possibilities!Yes, in six months or a year, I could switch to some other medium that I find just as liberating. Hooray! It isn’t about finding that one thing. For me it’s about finding the thing that lets me make the art that needs to be created. 

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Silvertone Pivot! 

Posted on April 16, 2024 by SusanG

Though I am growing to dislike that term (pivot) it is so overused these days. But it is what I did with the Silvertone headstock painting. And I’m going to share with you how that came about.

When I did the sketch out for the Silvertone I was planning on doing an acrylic ink stippling painting on canvas board that I had gessoed to almost smooth. Almost, because the one I made smooth had issues of its own when I started putting dots of acrylic on it. I had the canvas board prepared and set it aside to work on Fred, the fish, and to finish up the trio of tulips.

Working on Fred exposed some issues for me with regards to doing the stippling. It turns out to be a little hard on my eyes and my hands the way I do it. So, while I continue to work on Fred a little at a time, I’m currently not inclined to pursue additional stippling projects. This one will take quite a while to finish. 

Over the Easter weekend, I had a lot of time to work on art and one of the pieces I chose to tackle was a set of berries that I had started as an experiment. There were a couple of parts to the experiment, but one part was key to working on the Silvertone. The berries are pastel on canvas board that has been coated in a sanded gesso. I didn’t put much forethought into preparing the canvas board, so it was especially textured. It has the canvas texture with the sanded texture on top of that so a little challenging when trying to get a good consistent coverage. But I persevered and it came out great. I am still super excited about how it turned out. 

With the success of the berries, I looked at my prepared canvas board for the Silvertone and wondered if pastel might be a better choice for it. So I gave it a coating of the sanded gesso. The great thing is that the sanded gesso I have is clear, so it didn’t obscure the sketch that I had already done. Once it dried, I laid it on the art table as the next piece to start. This was the last night of the long weekend for me so I wasn’t really planning on starting anything. Except. Yeah, you got it. That “Except” word. With it laying on the table I thought ‘I wonder how that’s going to work.’

That was in reference to the background I knew I wanted to create. I wanted to use the browns, oranges, and yellows like a tortoiseshell style guitar pick. Or something more reminiscent of that. So I tried a bit of that to see if it was going to be as I hoped. And it was. But then I was faced with another challenge or puzzle. The logo. 

How was I going to handle the detail of the logo and get the black where it needed to be and keep a reasonably crisp line to the word? Especially given that the pastels I use don’t have a fine point to them. I started experimenting and landed on a method that was working quite well. I used a pastel pencil to mark in the brand name or logo and then a stump to even it out and sort of force the pastel into the surface so it would hopefully hold. Then for the black around it I took a different stump (smudging stick) and instead of using the pastel on the surface I rubbed the stump across the pastel to pick up the color and then used the stump to paint on the surface in between the letters and in the voids of the letters. It worked. And I thought I’d leave it there and go eat. I didn’t stay away of course. 

After dinner I had to return to the Silvertone and see how it was really going to look with this technique of painting with the stump. So I worked on it a while longer. The thing about using the stump to paint the pastel on the canvasboard is that it works quite well if you have a good even or thorough coating of the sanded gesso. If you have gaps, it’s not very effective. And in fact, if you have an acrylic gesso underlay with no texture and a not so thorough coating of texture then the pastel isn’t going to stick well no matter what you do. I found out the hard way.

The stump painting thing was working, and it had gotten late enough that I had to go to bed because I had day job the next day. You would think this would mean it would be a while before I got back to working on the piece. Well, not when every time you walk past it you feel compelled to do a little more and a little more. Because as it turned out the stump painting process also worked well in between strings and tuning pegs. Which means quite a lot got done in five-minute increments randomly throughout the day. I also took some time at lunch to work on it. 

That the Silvertone piece was being that compelling to work on was on the one hand really cool. I do enjoy pieces like that. They often come together fairly quickly and with some ease. On the other hand, they can be detrimental to things like sleep and getting much else done. I had Taekwondo class that evening so I worked on it a little before class and then, since I’d been up late the night before I thought I’d go to bed early. Except. I stopped in the studio a moment to try something and forgot to stop so I was late getting to bed again. 

I had some minor frustrations along the way. One was finding that I didn’t have a really good sand coat on the surface, so some areas had trouble taking the pastel. Another was my fix for that. Which may or may not be very sound. Since my gesso is clear, I thought I’d just add another coat. I made a point of spray fixing the pastel first but that wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped. I probably would have been better to give it a finish fix. It wasn’t helpful because, some of the pastels I work with are liquid soluble, so things smeared pretty good as I painted the gesso over it. I nearly destroyed it about halfway through working on it. Fortunately, I was able to work with the mess I made and use it somewhat to my ultimate advantage. Yes, I was worried for a moment.

And even after that, it did not become any less compelling. It demanded attention and got it because for me it was so exciting to see it come together. And at the point I dusted it the first time with the ‘glitter’ I was so excited I wanted to burst. That ‘glitter’ was another part that was a ‘how am I going to do this’. And to figure it out and see it work was awesome. Though, the spray fix did destroy it a couple of time because it is a dusting, and the pastel is liquid soluble and spay fix is a liquid. It took a couple of passes to get it to stay enough to be visible and look purposeful. 

I learned a lot doing this painting and the berries, but I made bigger mistakes and adjustments on this than the berries. It has also, well both paintings, have inspired me to do more pastel work. So much so that even finished the big experiment that I started last year. And, I have several more pieces lined up that I will be doing in pastel.  

For those who might be curious as to what I used to create the Silverton painting, I used a variety of soft pastels and pastel pencils. I used soft pastels from Sennelier and Rembrandt and pastel pencils from Conte and Derwent. And I used a little bit of Conte pastel crayons for the white and black. I used your regular run of the mill paper stumps and tortillons for painting on the surface in the tight areas as well as for smudging and blending the pastel. I did a lot of that with my fingers as well. My surface is a 12 inch by 16 inch canvas board that was pre-primed and then I added a couple more layers of gesso to smooth most of the canvas texture out. One layer was tinted. Then after I sketched in the basics for the headstock I added a layer, not enough of one, of Art Spectrum Colorfix Original. 

And that’s how the Silvertone became a pastel painting instead of the stippling painting as originally planned. 

And now to get started on the next thing. 

Cheers!

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Time

Posted on April 3, 2024 by SusanG

Ok so this isn’t the post I was going to put up next. But it’s the one I want to write and post right now. I’ve had an interesting, fun, and sometimes frustrating couple of weeks. That have culminated in a weekend with time that I really needed.

I couple of weeks ago I was asked to attend an event that turned out to be part of a school project for one of the young people I take Taekwondo with. As part of it they had an early Holi celebration, which for this event meant throwing colored powder at each other and generally enjoying getting a bunch of color all over each other. It was fun. And not entirely dissimilar to painting in soft pastels for me. Though I don’t usually manage to get them quite all over, I don’t think I’ve ever got it in my ear, but who knows.

On the way home from that my car decided to continue to plague me with the random, unidentifiable check engine light. The car trouble started when I took it in to get the tires checked and some general maintenance done so I could take it to Asheville, which I didn’t do. By the time of the light coming on after the event, and then going off a couple of hours later, it became apparent that the car was trying to break up with me. Fine. That meant finding a new vehicle.

The car was paid for. I had no car payment. I really wasn’t looking forward to getting a new car and having that payment again. But it really was time to call it quits with that car. So, I set about looking online to decide where I wanted to start the search. But my week was tight. I didn’t think I’d be able to look until the weekend. That is not what happened.

I inadvertently sent an inquiry to one of the dealers when I tried to find out what my car would be worth. Fortunately, it was a dealer with a car I liked. I got called the next morning asking about what I was looking for etc. They had something that fit my requirements and I could come look at it in my 2-hour window after work. Can you see how this is going? Yeah. I went and looked. Liked the car. Put a down payment because well it was the only one of that color and I didn’t want black, white, silver, or grey. I was late to my thing that was the end of my 2-hour window, but it worked out ok. I went back to the dealer after the dentist, two days later, and did the paperwork for the car. I didn’t spend my weekend looking for a car, which was awesome. I’m not sure I remember what I did with my weekend at this point. Some things are a bit of a blur. But it wasn’t looking for a car.

With the car problem solved I was a little more relaxed going into the days long upgrade process I was to start at the day job. I’d explain all the ins and outs of why this was a big deal and why it wasn’t a big deal in detail but that would be long and possibly boring to read. So, the short. Ish. We were trying to do an in-place upgrade of a system that I am responsible for and is historically fussy. I have a set of ‘practice’ servers for this, and I work with a vendor who has much more extensive experience with the software so I wasn’t all alone in this. I had one of our server engineers take ‘snapshots’ of the servers so if something went wrong, we wouldn’t have to rebuild the server, just rollback. Best decision I could have made. There are two servers that work together for this system and we managed to crash both of them hard. Hard, hard. So hard that we couldn’t boot into windows and even a repair failed. Rollback time. Try again, what did we do. Yeah, no joy. We did the same thing. But at this point we had an idea of what caused it so for the next try we crashed just one server to verify.

This is where all plans for this upgrade got completely trashed. We can’t do an in-place upgrade. There is good and bad to this. The good, it will be more beneficial for the business users as it will be a little less disruptive. The bad, in means a lot, a lot more work for me. That’s fine.

I had a meeting with my manager a day or so after the misadventure of the upgrade and he suggested that I take Monday (day after Easter) off. I have the time that’s not an issue, but I was back and forth. Until I realized this. My manager is former military. A commanding officer at that. And I imagine that if we were military, he would have means to make sure I took Monday off, but as we are not, he can’t force that I take the time off, he can only strongly recommend. I took Monday off. It was a great decision.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Time. I got two really valuable gifts of time this weekend. The first was that my Taekwondo class for Saturday was cancelled. My Master took the weekend as a holiday. This worked out because even though I know I could ‘skip’ class, I rarely do. And this meant I didn’t feel guilty for not going to class. The second was of course having Monday off. I used the time well.

I spent the weekend mostly arting. Yes, art is a verb.

I managed to finish two pieces, nearly finish a third, and start a fourth. I also did start and finish an experiment. I did some additional experimenting, on that fourth piece, and have a bunch of ideas of what and how I want to do the next pieces. I’m really excited about them. I can’t wait to get working on them.

The one piece that is almost finished gets to wait until I get to a stopping point on the fourth piece because that’s watercolor and the fourth piece is pastel and really messy. I need to clean in between working on the two. I’ve got pastel everywhere, though not in my ears, I don’t think.

The only thing about having all these ideas for paintings or art pieces I want to do is that, there just aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t have enough surfaces in my place to be working on too many at once. Though it’s not like that’s a big problem as some of these progress pretty quickly and they tend to keep my attention really well. Even to the point of getting worked on during my lunch time. Which reminds me of an IG post that redefines the starving artist concept. She says that we’re not starving artists because we can’t afford to eat, it’s because we put food on to cook, go to do just one tweak to a painting and come back to burnt food. Or, in my case, don’t get to eat right away because I have to go back to work and into a meeting. I can live with this. I really can. And I am honestly all smiles about it.

What’s next for me? I’m going to be finishing up the watercolor painting and the fourth painting, which as I mentioned, is pastel. And I want to finish up the bigger experiment that I started last year. Mostly because I need/want that board for another project that I would like to start. I’m also cleaning out my technical pens which isn’t really exciting and rather more embarrassing to realize I neglected them so badly. I’ll be posting more on Instagram and I’m making efforts to post more on Facebook, and I’m working on some other options for sharing my artwork. If you get this blog and don’t already know, I have a fine art prints store at: http://susanmichelleartist.com . I’ll be posting much of the art I’ve been working on the store once I get it photographed.

That’s it for me this time. I will be getting back to a more regular schedule with my blog posts, I just haven’t decided what the frequency will be so stay tuned, and thank you for sticking with me.

Cheers!

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I’m Going to Try This Again

Posted on February 21, 2024 by SusanG

This is the third time I’ve tried to write this post. The first time I didn’t know what to write about. I didn’t think I had anything to write about, so I just started writing and finally found something. But I didn’t get it posted. So, I tried again to write an update of what has happened since the last post, and it was long. I thought about trying to use what I wrote for that but in the couple days between finishing it and now, well, more has happened, and it would take considerable editing and then be even longer. So here goes.

I have finished both the Telecaster painting and the Turtle. Both have been to the photographer and back. I did something with these pieces that I’ve not done before. I kept track of how long it took me to complete them. From first pencil marks on board or paper to completion. Every time I sat down to work on them, I made a note of the time I started and stopped. It was a bit of an eye-opener.

The Telecaster painting is 12 inches by 16 inches. It is colored stippling using liquid acrylic inks on smooth gesso-ed canvas board. The background is brushed on liquid acrylic inks. It took about 47 hours to complete.

The Turtle painting is 18 inches by 24 inches. It is black ink stippling on watercolor paper. I used Copic Multi-liner pens to execute the small dots that make up the image. This one took 80 hours.

I had never made an effort to figure out how long some of my art takes me to do. I think that is partly because in the past I would work on a piece for a while and then work on something else for a while and maybe not get back to the first piece for days, or weeks. And maybe, also, because I didn’t take it seriously. But recently, as I’ve been trying to get my art in front of more people, I’ve had more people ask me how long a piece takes. So, this time I kept track.

If you’re wondering if that has made a difference in how I see my work? Yes. It did. I’m still processing that, so I don’t have any more to share about that yet. Let me let it sink in for a bit.

I did learn with the Telecaster that I prefer to do those type of paintings on a tinted support be that board or paper. So even though the grey under the Ovation was hard to cover, it did serve the purpose of making it very easy to tell if I had enough color saturation (enough dots). With the white support for the Telecaster, it was easy to think I’d got enough dots when really it needed another layer. So, the next one like that, I’ll be coloring the board before I start the dots.

I have two other paintings that I prepared when I started the Turtle and the Telecaster, so I’ll be working on those next. They are both watercolor paintings of flowers. Black Tulips to be more specific. When I was in Paris with my sister we walked through a large and beautiful garden on our way to the Louvre one day. We knew we wouldn’t be going in the Louvre, so we enjoyed the walk in the garden seeing the flowers, and trees, and sculptures. And we took pictures. Had I realized I would be painting them I probably would have taken the pictures more purposefully. As it is the reference I’m using was taken by my sister. Yay, sis!

I attempted to paint a black tulip not long after we got back but it didn’t go well, in my opinion. I’m sure someone would say it looks fine, but for me it’s an ok first attempt. I’ve had opportunity to watch parts of a bunch of process videos since then and I’ve learned a few things that I think will make these paintings turn out better.

The first one I’m working on is a small piece, just 8 inches by 8 inches, like many of my previous flower paintings. Its focus is a single tulip and so far, I’m quite pleased with it. I’m using the same paper I’ve used for the previous square shaped flower paintings, so I know and am comfortable with how the paper and the paint work together.

The second watercolor will be a little different, and bigger. It is on 12 inches by 12 inches watercolor paper that is made by the same company that makes the other paper I’m using but this is cold press, and the surface is a bit different, so I don’t know how that one will go. I’ll need to be patient with it. Also, it is a grouping of flowers, there are 3 tulips to feature in it so that will be a new challenge for me.

I haven’t quite decided what I’ll work on after I finish these two. It might be time to start thinking about that and sorting through photos. I have started a pastel piece, mostly as an experiment, that I might either finish as a pastel, or do as a watercolor, or maybe a modified version of it as a watercolor, or maybe do both the pastel and the modified watercolor. I’m not sure yet. I do like the color and the vibrancy of it.

So, there’s an art update. There is always more going on that is just life stuff and I’m not sure it’s worth writing about. Though since some of it probably got in the mental way of my getting this post out much sooner, I probably could have written about it. Rest assured, none of it was really bad or tragic. Just some car issues, that are frustrating, a bit of scheduled dental work, and either allergies or a cold or a combination. I have been out to play music. With the holidays over the jams have started back up and I’ve been to them. The last one was a lot of fun. We had a lot of players which is always fabulous. I’m hoping that happens more often. I would enjoy more opportunities to hang back and play and learn. Of course, that might mean I’ll need to put in a bit more practice more regularly and learn a few more songs. Like that’s a bad thing. It would be good example for my guitar student as well. Hopefully that gets you up to speed again. I’ll try to do better but you know, life, and art, and music, and…. Anyway. Until the next time. Cheers!

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