The Palm, The Lighthouse, and the Owl

No, that's not the title of a new fantasy novel.  It's what I drew or painted the past week or so.  First, the palm -- we had six fire alarms in our building the past week, most tedious (apparently they were all related to dishwashers or microwaves) and I finally got a clue by the last one to grab a sketch book on the way out.  The alarms take around 20 minutes to clear up, the perfect amount of time to find a subject and do a quick drawing:

Next, remember how I was impressed by the miniature paintings at the Edmonds art festival?  Well, I tried painting a 3" x 3" piece with acrylics, and boy howdy, was it hard!  I have lots of tiny brushes, but none seemed to handle the paint very well when it came to fine details, and getting the thickness or thinness of the paint needed for particular sections also proved to be quite tricky.  Perhaps next time, I'll stick to watercolor. Anyway, here is the Mukilteo Lighthouse, with a tea bag so you can appreciate the small size of the painting:

Finally, I finished up the illuminated "O is for Owl" picture, which used 22K gold leaf, watercolor, and colored pencil.

In other art adventures, Tina and I went to the Shoreline Art Festival on Sunday, and it was very different from the Edmonds festival.  Edmonds had a juried art show, with overall high quality, plus art/craft vendors.  Shoreline had art/craft vendors, a juried show, and a room called simply "more art" where they put everything that didn't make it into the juried section.

Tina entered a few of her photgraphs, and I entered one small watercolor.  Our stuff got into the juried show, thank goodness, for the "more art" show was full of wretchedly awful art.  But even the juried show had quite a few pieces that were just plain bad -- the only explanation I could think of was that there wasn't enough good stuff to fill the walls, and the poor judge had to pick the least hideous pieces from the reject pile to stick in there.

The other thing I noted was that only a couple of pieces had sold -- Tina told me that things did not sell at this festival, and given the overall lower quality, I could see why.  My piece didn't sell, which was fine -- I like it a lot and had deliberately priced it high, comparable to the prices on my work at the Four Corners gallery, in the hope that it wouldn't sell.  So it got to come back home where I can enjoy it.

So my overall impression is that the Shoreline arts festival is a low-rent version of the Edmonds one, and probably not worth bothering with next year.  I do plan to enter miniature paintings in the Edmonds festival next year.