Time for art!

Today was a lovely day spent with family. In addition, I had time to spread a bit of acrylic texture around on a few canvases to get them ready for painting. Opening up jars of paint and holding a palette knife or paintbrush brings me great joy.

I love that beat up old brush. It gives me textures that I can't get with a new one. The canvases on the left were gessoed. The one on the right has been spread with acrylic texture medium to prepare it for painting.

My paintings are taking many days of prep work, lately. It is a little difficult to hold on to the spark of delight that led me to want to paint each scene to begin with. I guess I've been spoiled by my acrylic paints. Oil painters deal with this all the time, unless they only paint alla prima.


I also had a chance to do a bit of sketching today. In my Christmas stocking was a Lamy Safari pen, so I have been trying it out. I am able to get a bit of variation in my lines, which was not the case with my fiber tipped and technical pens. I'm going to load it with a more water-resistant ink and see if I like it combined with watercolor. I've never been an ink/watercolor sketcher before (always preferred the softness of pencil!), but ink shows up better when you are sharing sketches online, so I'm giving it a try. And I love the raspberry color of my new pen!

New Year's Book

The weather has definitely started to act more like winter in Nebraska. I have heard about various methods of keeping water-based paints in liquid form when out painting snow scenes, but I guess I am not that dedicated. Maybe sketching from the comfort of a warm car is still an option. Or I need to find the fingerless gloves I bought in the Smoky Mountains years ago on a very cold camping and painting trip. Anyhow, in the meantime, I suppose it's time to dust off those indoor art projects I came up with in the fall.

 One project was a New Year's resolution book. Do you make New Year's resolutions? Do you look back on them and see if you have accomplished any at the end of the year? One pleasant surprise I had last week was in rereading my 2015 resolutions, and discovering that I had actually accomplished some. I didn't think I had accomplished much at all, so it was a great surprise. Of course, not everything was done, so some have been bumped to 2016's list. That's ok. I aim high, and readjust if necessary. Some of the goals couldn't be reached in a year, and I didn't realize that. We need to be kind to ourselves with these resolutions, and sometimes things really are not within our control. But it is good to take the time to reevaluate our lives and our hopes and dreams.

In any case, I found a book form in Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books called an accordion book with flower fold pages. I thought it would make a nice book for my 2016 resolutions, so I modified it. I had gouache from a calligraphy project sitting out on the worktable, so that was thrown in, too, though it didn't give the effect on the branches that I get with sumi ink or watercolor. The red for the berries, however, was as bright as I'd hoped.

The resolutions are written inside of the flower fold pages, which are glued inside of the accordion.

I am praying for a beautiful and inspiring year for my family, and for everyone who reads this. May 2016 be a year of peace and joy for you and yours!

Art, Fall, and Life!

Lately, I feel a bit like this little one:

I am finding a lot of ideas for art projects, and storing them away for winter. I've learned that part of caring for my artistic self is to spend as much time outdoors with a sketchbook now, while I can. The weather has been beautiful, if a bit warm.

Bigger projects can wait for when it is too brutally cold to set foot on a hiking trail.

I have also been experimenting with monoprinting using a Gelli plate. I don't have the results yet that I am looking for, but will be trying a few new experiments over the next few weeks.