Life's a Bowl of Cherries and a Cookie Jar

I started this a year ago and didn't get very far. Looking at it again I thought it might also qualify for "The Color of White Challenge."  So I decided to try to finish it.  I'm still at the "does it need anything else" stage. I will look at it for a while before I decide if it's finished. I spent a little more time on this one than the last one. It's done in watercolor pencil on watercolor paper. (8" x 8")

Daily Paintworks Challenge?

Oil Pastel - 6 x 6

Watercolor Pencil

I thought I would try to enter the most recent DailyPaintworks' Challenge, "The Color of White" with this watercolor pencil/oil pastel, but I'm not sure I am going to. I started out in watercolor pencils, but messed up my shadow. (I did'nt really have good lighting on this set up.) So I decided to try Belinda Del Pesco's advice and try to rescue it with another medium over it; I chose oil pastels. I had trouble with the perspective on the lip of the pitcher and the perspective on the place mat. I can usually tell if the perspective is off on other people's paintings, but darned if I can do it by looking at my own work. I even tried the mirror trick. The placemat had fruit on it with three dimensional shading, but if I copied that it looked like real fruit around the pitcher not under it. I'm not going to do that again. So thanks to Carol Flatt for mentioning the DailyPaintworks Challenge in her blog. It looks like it's going to be fun to enter and /or to follow.

Art Therapy

Flamingo and Friend--Oil Pastel, Art Card Size

I used an acrylic glaze with gloss medium and cobalt blue on watercolor paper. Then went over the drawing with oil pastel. It's not very detailed because I don't file my pastels down to points and the watercolor paper was kind of bumpy. I really like the feel of oil pastels, but I have trouble getting them to do what I want.

This was done just for therapy. One of my cats is not acting right--waiting for results from vet. My other son who lives near us just informed me he and his girlfriend are thinking of moving to Florida too. We can't move--we have 38 years of stuff to clean out of the house. If my husband would retire now, it would still take us two or three years to clean out the house and fix it up. My sister doesn't want us to move either--her children are all in other States.

Also, my internet and phone went out at about 6:00 yesterday and the discount service we have apparently doesn't work on weekends. They just got it fixed. Now my scanner is not letting me save to my picture file the way I usually do and the blog is not uploading my picture. (This kind of cancelled out the therapy value.) I guess blogspot also made some changes I have to figure out . The older I get the harder it is to make changes. It could be worse--I could be living in northern Japan. Those poor people. I should count my blessings. 

Update

I just spent two or three days trying to reorganize my art supplies so I could be more efficient at finding what I need to paint and to be able to see what supplies I actually have already. I also started a trial subscription to ArtistsNetworkTV and have been watching some of the art instruction videos, but I have only until May to watch as many as I can unless I extend my subscription. I'll decide after I watch some more. I was particularly impressed with John Lidzey's watercolor demonstration so much so that I ordered a book about mixing colors that he coauthored. Can't wait for it to get here. I got a late start on watching the videos because my husband and I went to Florida two weeks ago to see our new granddaughter who is about one month old. I should have waited to subscribe until we got back, but I thought the special trial offer through North Light might not last too long. Also, after the holidays, I spent some time cleaning out a space in the attic so I could move a chest of drawers from the back room (where I paint) up to attic and replace it with my husbands old desk that has been sitting in our dining room for a year or so since his mother sold her house. The plan is to set up the old computer which still has photos on it that I need to download and to use the old printer/scanner for artwork duties. It seems to take forever to actually realize the plans I visualize in my head. I need to work faster.

Our New Granddaughter