When Planets Collide (or look like they might....)

 I got to see the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction!  Whee!!!!

The skies had been dismally overcast every night for weeks, with no letup in the forecast last week.  So even though I spent part of December 21 basking in the backyard in sixty degree sunshine...

...I still had little hope of seeing anything, with cloudy skies predicted.  Imagine my surprise when, on going outside at 5:30pm for some reason (I never go out then...what was I doing?  I HAVE NO IDEA), the skies were mostly clear!

So I looked over the tree line to the SW, and saw two bright starlike objects which appeared to be practically on top of each other.  PLANETS CONJUNCTING!  I grabbed my binocs and the lights turned into Jupiter and Saturn.  I have no way to take night photos, but it looked a lot like this one I found on the always-helpful Internet:

So that was a thing.

Yay!  I saw planets!  

Okay, so that was an exciting way to end the first day of Winter, when it was sunny and warm and did I mention sixty degrees.  A few days later things changed:

Eep.  From sixty to thirty!  We got about an inch of the white stuff, but neither rain nor sleet nor snow shall stay Pippin from his appointed Squirrel Watch:

After making absolutely certain no fluffy tree rats were trying to invade their snowy domain, the Hounds retired to a comfy, cozy nap on the sofa.

That was it for Nature's bounty last week.  Whew.

On to the art!

Our sketch zoom group did these cypress bonsai trees, which I drew the old-fashioned way with pen and colored pencil:

On a non-group sketch day, I decided to practice more with the digital painting app, Adobe Fresco.  I watched a tutorial in which an artist painted some mountains and trees, and got only about ten minutes into it before deciding that would be fun to try.  So I invented my own scene like that, perhaps channeling a bit of Bob Ross and his happy little trees, and drew it on the iPad in about an hour and a half:

That was a fun exercise.  And I had so much fun drawing and painting digitally that when the Zoom sketch group met again the next day, I decided to use it for our practice piece.  

We chose this rather complex Japanese scene, with loads of challenges.  I tackled it the same way I would had I been using my non-digital tools -- I used a pen tool first to do a quick sketch to get all the elements in the right places, and to add a few details.  Then I chose a couple of different brush tools similar to watercolor round brushes to paint over my sketch (though I left quite a few ink lines showing), and then a tool that mimics colored pencil fairly well, followed by the blending tool.  

It was all done very fast, as we have a one-hour time limit.  I wanted it to look like a sketch rather than a finished piece, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

That's all from here in the hinterlands.  See you in the new year!