spring at last!

Happy Spring to my northern hemispherical friends! Not much has come up in the garden as of yet but my hellebores are going strong despite getting buried in snow a few weeks ago :) And whatever flowering tree I have there is juuuust about ready to flower. Oh, and the spotty green leaves are my pulmonaria popping up.

I feel like I'm coming out of hibernation, too...do you get that feeling in spring? One day of sunshine and I'm whizzing around doing things in the house and weeding in the garden and kind of all over the place.

I took these pics with my new camera which does not have a handy little screen that I can tilt up towards me when I'm trying to photograph something down at ground level. My old camera was great for this sort of thing (although not the greatest camera). So I tried to point the camera up under the hellebores and click and then look what I got. Not the most efficient method but I got some interesting compositions that way :)

facebooking

Ok, Hollie has finally gotten me inspired to figure out the facebook fan page. If you'd like to push the button, it's right over there on the sidebar. Thanks Hollie! My hero :)

gallery

My little pieces are now up at Ghost Gallery in Seattle. Here's some pics if you'd like to take a look. There's some other great miniature pieces there, too!

Thanks to gallery owner/curator Laurie Kearney! They look great :)

squares

6x6", gouache and graphite on stonehenge paper.

Here's what I actually ended up putting in the two 6" frames for the gallery. I think this is the last of what I've been working on lately :)

fyi: that is some genuine old rickrack from my grandma's sewing box that I used for the reference photo. It even has the tiny little pin and the card it came on. Clearly my hoarding tendencies are genetic, which means it's not my fault that I can't throw away craft and art supplies that I might be able to use someday. I'm relatively tidy about many things but art supplies, crafty things, and books I always seem to keep. This is why you don't see that many photos of the inside of my studio, I guess. I can't stop hoarding in there but at least I know that I should feel a little shame about it :D

snow and moss

Digital collages, 9x9".

These are from some pictures I took over the last couple days - one set of pics of snow falling at night, taken with a flash. That's what all the spotty spots are. The other pics were the next day in the snow of some mossy trees.

I took a kitty out in the snow to look around and this is what she did when I actually set her down in the snow. Those little toes all spread out with claws extended mean she was not too sure about all this :)

collages

I scanned these little paper collages before I put them in their frames last week and forgot to post them so you could actually see what they look like :) And obviously I had the digital ones at the top finished before I printed and framed them, too. I've been fighting a cold and I'm not quite on top of things yet, I guess.

The two digital collages are 4x4" which is, let's face it, really tiny. I tried to keep them sort of simple compared to the big pieces so they wouldn't look too cluttered. Trying to keep some white space when there's only four inches to work in is kind of hard :P The purple is derived from photos I took of my hellebores which are just starting to bloom. The sort of scroll-y patterns are out of a 1920s or so copy of Pride & Prejudice. I've been re-reading (and re-watching) Jane Austen lately...very soothing, much like knitting and such to me.

oils

4x4"
4x4"
6x6"

Here's the scans of those new oils I was working on.

I couldn't resist trying a new color when I was at the art supply store a week ago. I hadn't tried Williamsburg paints before and I couldn't justify buying any when I already have plenty of paints...until I spotted this one. The top of the label is the actual paint sample and it's called Ultramarine Pink. Who ever heard of an Ultramarine Pink? I like it a lot.