A Dark Day for Seattle

Yesterday at lunch time I had a feeling that either something really bad had just happened or was about to.  When I was at the YMCA working out, I made the mistake of turning on the TV on the elliptical machine and found out what it was.

The news was on about 4 victims who had been shot and died, another person shot and fighting for their life, and ending with the suspected shooter killing himself.  I felt absolutely horrible.  My heart and sympathy goes out to the victims and their families.

I just can't understand these acts of violence.  Why can't we all love each other and get along?

So after learning of this, it influenced the cat painting I made yesterday.  I was in a sad and gloomy mood.

I experimented with granulating watercolors.  Daniel Smith makes a fascinating watercolor paint they call Moonglow.  It is great for shadows, and it granulates in very interesting ways, but it's also completely unpredictable-- at least I've found it to be so.  So the basis of this painting is Moonglow, with some cerulean blue, electric blue (which is actually sort of iridescent) and a touch of alizarin crimson.  Here is the resulting painting.  I'm really happy with the granulation.  What do you think?

 

April Showers Bring May Flowers... Finally!

Well, now that May is almost over, we are finally getting the results of all the April showers.  Our yard has quite a few blooms.  The bees really love the pink flowers-- I think they are called lupine.

Red Flowers with Fern

Beautiful Purple and White Iris

Pink Flowers

Close up of pink flowers with Bee

Our backyard vegetable garden is also starting to produce.  Tonight we had 2 fresh radishes from our garden.  The bigger one is about the size of a red potato.  They were so good!  There is nothing like produce picked seconds before.

I'm sharing this with you because my cat painting for today is still too wet.  It needs to dry before I can work on it more and complete it, but I did paint today, making this the 11th day of my chain.

Orange Kitten

Here is my painting for today.  I started it before work and finished when I got home.  I forgot to mention, all of my paintings are 7 x 10 inches and done in watercolor.  This one has more layers than the others.

The Paintings So Far...

So as promised earlier, here are the paintings I've done in the last 8 day and today.  Unfortunately I don't have all of them to show you right now because I took 3 of them to the frame shop.  When I get those back I'll post photos of them too.

Today's cat

May 27, 2012

May 26, 2012

May 23, 2012

May 22, 2012

May 21, 2012

May 20, 2012

My son wants me to do a cat painting every day for the first month, then the subject matter can be anything.  Sounds good to me!

The Beginning

For the longest time I have felt blocked creatively and in my art.  Then I came across a gem of a little book titled Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.  This is by far the best book I've read this year, and I'm a voracious reader.  Here is a video to the book trailer.

Steal Like An Artist Book Trailer

This book finally got me going again.  There is so much useful info and inspiration in this book!  One of the things suggested in the book is to get yourself a calendar then put a big, fat X in each day when you've done your work.  The goal is to get a chain of as many boxes filled in a row as you can.  I thought making X's in the boxes would be a bit like counting days in prison, so instead I found some motivational stickers designed to get kids to brush their teeth every night.  I started the project on May 20, 2012.  Here's my calendar so far:

As you can see, I've done 8 days in a row now, but nothing for today yet.  I better get busy with today's painting!  Then I'll show you some of what I've done so far.