Fields, 20 x 28" acrylic on textured canvas

I had some fun this morning making a larger-than-my-usual painting, and I even used house-painting brushes for most of it, which seemed somehow weirdly wrong.  They worked well to cover the canvas, though, and I have some other large-ish canvases, so I’ll be using them again.    Originally I’d been planning a much more orange picture, but it wanted to be this way.  I didn’t feel like arguing….

"Edge of the Woods", 10 x 12" acrylic on textured canvas

Well, yesterday it finally happened: I had to turn on the heat when I came downstairs in the morning.  First time this autumn, and certainly not the last, although today it is much warmer again and no extra heating is required.  The forecast for the rest of the week looks pretty moderate, in fact, so it may be (may it be!) a long while before I have to use the furnace again.

My painting is another fall one — have I mentioned that I just love the fall colours?    But I’m starting to think of snow scenes to use for this year’s Christmas card….

“Edge of the Woods” is available to purchase here.

Me, in orange, purple and yellow -- acrylic, 6 x 12" (not the best photo, so imagine it in focus and without the glare on the left!)

Following the Masters has a very challenging challenge right now — “The Art of the Self Portrait”.  It wasn’t so much the portrait itself that was the challenge for me, but calling it “finished” was hugely difficult.  One more dab here, a little value change there, a bit of different blue alongside that yellow, and pretty soon you’ve lost what made the picture worth doing in the first place.  Ah well, every painting is a learning experience, if nothing else.  With this one, I learned that I should have quit about thirty minutes before I actually did.  In the end I just stopped before messing it up any further….

September, 8 x 10" acrylic on textured canvas

Yet another internet challenge painting, this time for the Wet Canvas landscape forum, which Karen the blogless (no blog, no web site, what’s wrong with that woman?) pointed me at.  Every month several photos are posted, and people choose one (or several, in some cases) to paint.  The one I used as my reference is here, but I’m not sure if you can see it unless you sign up as a member to the Wet Canvas site (if you make art, or want to, it’s worth signing up and taking a look around — there are hours’ worth of inspirational browsing and some great information there).   There are an awful lot of talented people out there, and it’s always interesting to see the different takes on the same picture.

I’ve started texturing the canvases before I paint, and I’m liking how that turns out.  One of my next projects will be a winter scene for a Christmas card, and I’m looking forward to trying out snow on the textured support.  I think it will add to the look of the snow.

Pinned out a bit so you can see the pattern better

Elisabeth’s llama/bamboo yarn is slowly becoming a hat.  I am really loving working with this yarn — it’s soft and cuddly and smooth and creamy (well, fellow fibre people will know what I mean by that), and just a really wonderful yarn to play with. By the way, the colour in this photo is much closer to the actual yarn than the picture in the previous post.

This may look more like a scarf than a hat, but it is the bottom band of the hat, which I’m working flat and will graft into a round.  Then I’ll pick up the crown stitches along the top edge and work those in the round.  When the hat is finished, it’s going to Elisabeth and may end up in her shop, or on her Christmas market table.  Hard to believe it’s time to start thinking about Christmas, but it’s not that far away….

This is Where the Light Comes From, acrylic 10x12"

This is a painting of how the early morning light comes into my kitchen and falls on the wall behind one of the counters — at least, that’s how the painting started.  Or, that’s one of the ways it started.  It really started because I wanted to do something with a lot of texture, so I applied a textured ground to a canvas and left it on the kitchen counter to dry.  The next morning I saw the light hit it and decided to base my picture on that.  Over the course of several mornings, I worked on portraying the light.  It has some metallic copper and gold in it that is a bit hard to photograph — couldn’t get it with my somewhat venerable Coolpix at all, so I had to ask Frank to take a picture with his much much fancier camera (one of the advantages to being married to a photographer) — but even he couldn’t get the metallic shine to show.  It’s a more interesting painting in person.

This is a departure from my usual style, but with the fingers on my painting hand still unable to do any fine, detailed work (getting better every day, though), I decided the time was right to try something less pictorial and with a looser technique.  I think I managed that here.

The painting reminds Frank of one of his photographs of Antelope Canyon, which is also a picture of light: Antelope Canyon 1.

Ok, I’m going to finish my coffee and get back to work on cleaning out the basement….

Edge of Autumn, 3 x 5" acrylic on canvasboard

There are so many interesting painting challenges on the web these days!  Over at Different Strokes From Different Folks the current challenge is cupcakes.  The Virtual Paintout is touring Lisbon this month. Painting at About.com has “miniature paintings” as the September challenge.  That last one is where I entered the autumn painting on the left.

Our weather is slowly tipping into autumn (not that we had much of a summery summer this year), with cooler nights, foggy mornings and that crispness in the afternoon.  The scene in the painting is a little farther along into the season than we currently are.  Autumn is my favourite time of the year, and I’m looking forward to the smells and colours ahead.  Woodsmoke, gold and red leaves, pumpkins, harvest moons….

"Three Poplars", acrylic on 3 x 5" canvas board

Another little one done while having my morning tea….

The weather today is (for a change) warm and sunny, so I felt inspired to convey warm sunniness in the painting.  By this afternoon there are supposed to be showers and thunder again (we’ve been having lots of both lately), so perhaps I’ll do something stormy for my next one.

"Barcelona Morning", 3 x 5" acrylic on canvas board

Over at The Virtual Paintout, Bill Guffey each month invites people to tour a different city via Google Street View and create art from something they see.  Last month, it was Florence, Italy, and this month it is Barcelona, Spain.  My painting is from a view of a golf course.  I wanted to portray a morning with the sun just coming up, the cool, damp grass and trees and the promise of a hot day ahead.  Since it’s such a tiny picture, it was finished in one go, all alla prima-like, just after breakfast on a Sunday morning.  It’s perhaps not as exciting as real tourism, but there’s no jet-lag to worry about, and your luggage can’t go missing….

A mix of photography and digital painting

It’s been hard to get posts written lately, but I have been working on some things….

This picture started with one of Frank’s photos of a rusted metal surface.  I doodled around over top of it with Artrage, a digital art program that I really like.  This is my first attempt at this sort of thing.  I think I’ll try letting more of the under-layer of rust texture show through on my next one.  With this one, I looked more at the shapes of the rust-scape for inspiration and got used to the workflow involved; next time I’ll play more with what the photograph has to offer, I think.

A cable and rib patterned boot sock

Seems like ages since I’ve written here.  It’s been a busy time of appointments and classes all to do with Frank’s new diagnosis of diabetes.  Life is settling back to normal again (the new normal), though, and I’ve found the time for some knitting-pattern writing and some painting.

The half-a-sock on the left is something I’ve been working on with only a little enthusiasm as the weather gets warmer and warmer.  Knit in sport-weight yarn, it really is more of a fall and winter sock, and in summer my knitting fancy tends to turn to lacy shawls and scarves.  At any rate, there’s very little left to do, and virtually no figuring out of things because the foot will be a very standard heel-flap, rounded toe, ribbed foot.  If I can muster up the wanna-do-it-ivity, the pattern should be ready for posting sometime next week.  I suppose it might be timely for my southern hemisphere readers, but I doubt anyone around here needs it any time soon!

"Early Morning", 5 x 7" acrylic on board

This morning I woke up around 4:30 (not unusual for me in the summertime), had a cup of coffee and some cereal, and then, perhaps because it was still early, I felt inspired to do a little painting (it’s only 5 by 7 inches) of a sunrise over a body of water.  To me, this looks like a sunrise when most of the sky is covered with clouds.  Frank thought it was the moon peeping through some nighttime clouds.  Honestly, some people!    In any case, I’ve titled it “Early Morning” so there’s no room for doubt.  Of course, the more I look at it, the more it looks like the moon peeping through nighttime clouds….  Hmmmmmm.