A Bit of This and That

Today I'm going to start with the art and end with wiener dogs, with a bit of nature in between.

So, one habit I have is to get excited when my friends show off their new art supplies and what they can do with them, which causes me to order the same art supplies and try to replicate what they did, often with dire results.  Often I give up after one or two butchered attempts and the new supplies wind up in the Closet of Forgotten Obsessions.

Sometimes I persevere, though, until I get at least one result that I like.  Take toned paper.  Toned paper is, as one might surmise, not white.  It can come in many colors, but most often the best results are produced on tan, gray, or black paper.  One of my friends had some toned paper.  It looked like fun.  So guess what I bought some months ago?

And this time, I've had some success, and it has yet to find its way from the Dining Table That Is Now an Art Desk into the Closet of Forgotten Obsessions.  You may recall the tan toned paper that I used for this lovely bookshop drawing:

I did a couple other things on this paper that I liked, and then I did several things that failed miserably, and I was close to giving up when, while ordering other stuff online, I noticed a pad of gray toned paper and thought, oh well, why not?  Maybe gray will work better...you never know.

So I got the gray toned paper and played around with a picture of a seashell and wound up with this:

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.  The idea is to use white ink for highlights, black ink for shadows, and leave the color of the paper for the middle values.  I haven't quite got the hang of it all, but for now, the toned paper is staying on the Dining Table That Is Now an Art Desk.  Yay.

Then I returned to something that is much easier for me to use -- watercolor.  I love watercolor because I've been using it for decades and I know how to mix the colors I want (most of the time), and I know what it will do when I blend wet-in-wet (mostly most of the time), and I know what will happen if I try dry brush or lifting out techniques (some of the time).  And knowledge is power!  I think.

Anyway, we had our usual two Zoom group art practice sessions, where we choose a photo and all draw/paint it and at the end of 90 minutes or so we Share Our Work.  The session pic was of a shrine thing in Bali somewhere (we get these from Instagram or Pinterest et al and they're not always labeled well).

I drew the shrine and rocks first in brown ink with a lot of detail which was subsequently lost with the watercolor washes but oh well, it made me happy and took up some time.  Then I did wet-in-wet for the sky, with some lifting-out for the clouds.  Then all it needed was some washes of color for the water, building, rocks, and beach.  DONE!

Our next session's pic was more complex -- a hillside in Tuscany.  It had clouds, a misty background, a bit of fog in the middle ground, pesky cypress trees and a house in the foreground.  And green.  Lots and lots of green.  I did not use any ink, just did a quick pencil sketch and then went straight to watercolor, using a LOT of wet-in-wet and lifting out.  There's a technique I use that's hard to explain, but I'll try.  It involves putting plain water across a section, say, the middle ground hillside, then brushing a medium value green onto it, then using a paper towel to dab out where the misty foggy lighter areas should be, quickly, and then using a smaller brush to dab in bits of darker green where the trees are while that initial color is still damp and hoping it blends okay.  Let it dry, then add details as needed.  Seemed to work well for this piece.

Okay, I've gone on long enough about art and its challenges.  On to nature!

Things are starting to bloom at my house.  Here is the dogwood in the front yard:

And the lilac:

In the back yard garden, after fretting over a late snow/frost, I was pleased to see some of the newly planted perennials surviving, like this columbine:

The penstemmon, delphinium, lungwort, and lavender all survived the record-breaking Spring cold snap.  Whew.  Now I am waiting to see what the other plants do.  Presumably, there will be Black-eyed Susans sometime this summer, and roses, and liatris, and clematis, and phlox, and more lavender and oh gosh, just lots of things.  Wait and see!

The natural world beyond my home was also splendid this past week.  Here is a view from one of our usual walks along the Columbia River:

We had a bonus Great Blue Heron sighting:

And another sign that Spring really is here now -- a migratory Yellow-rumped Warbler:

And now, finally, what you've been waiting for:  wiener dogs!

We had a lovely Spring day for the weekly Dachshund Club walk, and while Pippin's girlfriend Madison was not there (she was visiting Seattle), there were plenty of other dogs to keep him entertained.

There was even a Truman lookalike!  The dog at the top is NOT Truman. He's at the bottom:

Pippin was momentarily confused and went to give the Faux Truman a kiss:

The Real Truman was worn out by it all, and this is how he spent that afternoon:

Such a sweet boy.

That's all (and that was plenty!) for this past week.  

Have a lovely time out there, everyone!

Nothing Doing

 For one thing, we had SNOW this past week, and it was COLD, and there was NOTHING to do but sit around staring at the wretched weather from the comfort of the living room.  Sigh.

We also got quite a lot of rain, and I did get out at least once to check out the storm clouds.  We even got a walk in between the showers.

Even though I don't like the rain, these passing storms do turn out some excellent thunderclouds.

So that was it for my week's activities:  went for one walk to look at clouds.  Yay.

As for the art sessions, I hated one piece and loved the second piece, so here's the one I liked:

The most important news from this past week, though was that Friday the 15th was Truman's TENTH birthday!  My, how time flies.  And what wonderful times they have been.  We hope to have many many more years together!

As for Pippin, who is usually so photogenic, well...he went to the groomers and she put bunny ears on him for his post-session pic.   I got the feeling he did not approve:

I'm hoping we will have weather that is more like Spring this coming week, and that we will get Out and About.  

May you all have a lovely and SPRINGy week out there, too!

Blown Away

One day last week the forecast said, Southwest winds 25-35mph with gusts as high as 60.

I stayed inside.  In fact, the forecast actually told us to stay indoors if possible, and to keep away from windows.  Never had that in the warnings before.  Turned out to be less dramatic than that, with one roof shingle making its way off the roof and into the backyard, and one plastic garbage bag from across the street making its way onto my front yard.  Otherwise, we survived!

I got a lot of drawing done that day!  I decided to return to colored pencils for a rendering of this pic, which is the ONLY officially released photo from the filming of Good Omens Series 2:

The drawing turned out okay, though I'm only about 75% happy with it.  That's all right.  Next year sometime there should be LOTS of new images to try out, when the second series finally airs.  Sigh.

I did take some in-progress pics which some people enjoy seeing, so here they are.  This is Aziraphale in many layers of unblended colored pencil:

And here he is with the left half blended, using a bristle brush and baby oil:

And here he is completely blended, though not yet burnished (as in the final piece above).  

Then we had our Zoom sessions.  This is a medieval Spanish street view, using ink, watercolor, and gouache on toned paper:

I have no idea where the photo ref for this was taken.  I painted whatever/wherever it is in just watercolor:

For more artistic fun, one of the group was working on a complex scene of mountains and icebergs and wanted advice on how to paint the shadowed areas, so I decided to paint it, too, to see if I could figure that out.  For that one major shadowed area between the mountain and the middle iceberg, I just painted it first with the same colors as the non-shadowed mountain, then let that dry, and then glazed over the bottom area with a gray-blue-lavender wash. Seemed to work fine.

Last but hardly least, we had another wiener walk on Saturday, and FOUR new dogs turned up.  Here they are next to Truman:

Pippin got to greet his girlfriend Madison:

They are always so adorable together!

That's all for now.  Have a great week out there, everyone!

Not a Lot of Stuff

Last week there was a lot of stuff to post about, but this time I have very little.  Didn't see any birds other than the regulars. Didn't draw or paint anything worth sharing (massive failure during our Zoom sessions--sigh.)  Mostly I worked on decorating the outbuilding room, and did some garden shopping.

You may recall that the outbuilding, which I'm now going to call the Summer House, had one finished 12x12 room.  New flooring and baseboards were put in, and it was ready for use.  Unfortunately, the walls had been painted gray, which in my world, Simply Would Not Do.  Fortunately, I had paint leftover from doing my living room--some pale blue and a lovely lavender.  There wasn't enough of one color for all the walls, so I just did half and half.

Here is an in-progress pic, with the hideous gray on the far left:

I put test patches of each color on each wall, let them dry, and then determined which walls would look best in light blue (the ones that didn't get as much natural light), and which would be good painted lavender (the brighter two walls).  

Then I added an area rug, some thermal curtains, and a little wall decor:

I also had a fan, and an extra dog bed to toss in there.

After a bit of shopping, the lawn chair soon got replaced by a quite nice sofa:

Next came a small desk for the laptop and radio/CD player.  It's a comfortable spot, and the dogs enjoy it.  Now all it needs is lots more decorative items!  Whee!

As for my gardening efforts, the flowering perennials finally appeared at the local nurseries.  Hoorah!  Below you can see a few that are starting to bloom -- the two in the rear are penstemon (aka Beard's-tongue) and delphinium, and in front of them, lavender and lungwort (such an ugly name for a lovely plant!).  The heather I planted a couple of weeks ago is in the very front left, still looking good.

I also planted more stuff elsewhere, but it's too early for any of them to look like much, so no pics yet.  Later, I hope, if they grow and bloom -- I got more lavender, a liatris, a clematis, and two rudbeckias (aka Black-eyed Susan).  Fingers crossed!

Finally, a long time ago (well, okay, November) I started a second Good Omens needlepoint, using my colored pencil of Aziraphale as the pattern:

I really struggled with this one.  The first half or so wasn't too awful but by the time I hit the two-thirds point, I was ready to give up.  The complexity of the pattern and the colors, which turned out more in the orange range than I liked, were not happy-making.  It was taking a long time, too -- each 2,000-stitch row averaged 9 days of work, and there were 17-1/2 rows.  ARGH!

But after taking a bit of a break, I decided to just plow on through and finish it, and last week, after a mere four months of effort, I succeeded!  Whew.  

THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND STITCHES.  DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE!!!

So that was gratifying.

No plans for this coming week yet, other than to try to do better drawings at the Zoom sessions, keep an eye out for more plants, and hunker down in the wind (supposed to get gusts up to 50 today--whoa!).

Stay safe out there, and have a great week!