Weekend(s)

I've been offline a bit lately - two family visits in a row will do that to you :) Last weekend we drove out to Port Townsend to have a look around. I'd never been there before but it's a cool little town.

We took a route that included a ferry ride because it's more fun that way.

Lots of old buildings.

We saw two wooden ships that (if we had known about them) you can go sail around in.

And of course we walked around on the beach.

I'm not sure what we're doing for the next family visit this weekend but I imagine it will be some other tourist-y things :)

And now it's dry

This is another one of those diagrams from my railroad book that I've mangled to suit my purposes :)

I mixed about 5 different greens before settling on this one but I'm not sure what to call it...pale mint? Sage green? It's a little too green to be sage green which I picture as being very gray. I hope the pencil lines show up a bit better now so you can see them wandering around.

I'll try to remember to take more in-progress shots next time I oil paint because I think it's interesting to look back and see what I put down and left alone and what I went back and blended out. I like the roughness of the line I put down at the start of the painting but I don't want all of them to be so dark. It's really hard for me not to want to blend everything out but I feel like when I do the painting loses some energy (although the oils I did last year are very peaceful looking because of this).

Still drying

Here's what I was working on last night - it's too wet to move or scan right now. I think it was a 10x10" panel with canvas. It's fun to paint loose and draw in pencil lines in the wet paint (although they don't show up that well in this photo). I draw the lines all wobbly and random and all the paint lines are wobbly too! Scary! I don't know why I'm ok with oils being sketchy but all my pencil/gouache/watercolor drawings have to be super clean.

My experimenting with gouache and opaque colors have made me want to use the oil colors in a more glaze-y, translucent way. I hope the scans will show this because I think it's a nice effect in this piece. I use alkyd medium to make the paint dry faster anyway and I just increase the proportion of medium to paint a bit to make it more of a glaze.

Pushing Daisies

I planned to do some painting today but I didn't feel too great. After I took a nap and decided that I wasn't going to get anything useful done, I watched some Pushing Daisies. It's comfort TV (you know, like comfort food). Of course it was cancelled after only 2 seasons as always happens to great shows.

Anyway, if you haven't already experienced the joy, here's a link to a clip on Youtube. Full disclosure: there is singing. But I still love it and I don't care for musicals :)

A treasury? Me?

Ok, so I've never tried this before but I had a sudden whim to try making one of these Etsy treasuries. Now that you can apparently just make one and you don't have to wait for a spot, that is. I never could quite be bothered to figure all that out :) Anyway, here's some lovely things from some of my favorite people...these were all pulled straight out of my list of fave shops.

Post on Scoutie Girl

Tara of Scoutie Girl posted on my work today! I popped in to check the blog as I do, and there's my name in giant letters! Startling, to say the least :) Thanks, Tara! And I've never gotten a "divine" before :D

Seed-y

I loooove planting plants and starting seeds and coming up with all my little ideas for how the garden is going to look each year. So here's a little seed to celebrate spring, assuming it ever turns up around here. We had this exact same weather in January and I'm kind of over it.

I didn't use any straight white gouache on this one because I wanted to keep it subtle. I think it's easier to push the lines a bit darker when the paper already has some color to it.

Pins (and needles)

More sewing - although it's just pinning, really. I wanted to include some of the preparatory steps to making things as well as sort of actual making, like with those scissors a few weeks ago.

I did some testing with colors on this paper and I decided I like the neutrals best. Something about the blues and greens didn't look as good as on the white paper. I used the same colors as the last one to mix the grays - indigo and sepia, plus white.