Painting with Fall Leaves

Todays project is to design some products for fall. I'm hoping that the painting I'm working on would look nice on table linens and as a background on Thanksgiving cards. I started by painting a softly blended background in fall colors.

Next I gathered leaves from around the yard and applied paint to the back of those so I could stamp leaf shapes over the top of the background.

 There's still a lot of work to be done but I wanted you to see how it's going so far.

Here's a close up view of the project so far.

I finished with the painting just in time as most of the leaves are to dry and brittle to work with now.

The first of my projects with this design on Zazzle were paper plates, napkins and placemats with a bit of Thanksgiving text on them.

I'm headed back to work now to see what else I can do with it.

Fall Color in the Garden

Well, the weather is getting too cold for me. I've gone indoors with 3 celery plants raised from the base of celery from the grocery store, 1 lettuce plant that survived in the garden and some chive plants. There isn't much room in our small house so I just keep a few edibles for dinner instead of regular houseplants.

The large, golden tree you're seeing in the backyard is a walnut, one of three here.

There are also maples, an oak, a birch and a number of other small trees on our lot and a half in the city.

We've also got 2 large fir trees in the front yard that I've forgotten to take pictures of.

I'm not quite sure what we've got here. The grapevines have gotten around , through and all over this poor tree. It makes the colors interesting but probably isn't good for either of them.

It's been a good summer so I'm really going to miss the garden until next season. While I wait I'll be looking over my photos and working on some drawings and paintings of my favorite flowers, plants and trees.

Art to go

Here's an Iris in watercolor on and envelope. It's important to use watercolor envelopes because regular envelopes will wrinkle and break down. They're available at most places where you purchase art supplies.

 This card started out differently. I was trying to come up with a new design for a dala horse in pencil but didn't care for the way it was turning out so I decided to watercolor over the main body of the horse.

That didn't help much either but I did feel that it was an improvement.

I'm always writing letters so I feel that it's a great chance to unwind and work on design ideas. Everyone seems to enjoy being part of the design process and it helps keep the mail interesting.

Large Woodpecker Outside My Window

I'm sorry I wasn't able to get a better picture. It was quite a surprise to see it and there was only time to grab my phone. I tried cropping it closer but every time I did, it was just too blurry to see.

We often get smaller varieties of woodpeckers but I haven't gotten very good pictures of those either.

We are considering getting one of those automatic wildlife cameras if we can find somewhere to put it where it won't disturb anyone. In an urban setting it's a bit more of a challenge but I'm sure it can be done. 

Sunflower Bird House

We have a number of birdhouses mounted to the wheelchair ramp. While this one was off to paint the rails I decided to add a few sunflowers to go with the overall theme of the project.

Saving Seed

  
I let a lot of the flowers go to seed here then clip off the tops and shake the seed out. That method works best for the purple coneflowers and the black eyed susans.

 For the orange cosmos here we just reach down and let the seed fall into our hands.

It's a great way to save money and get next years garden off to a good start.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of these flowers back again next year.

The Hawk in my Garden

 We were out in the front of the garden planting bulbs when we looked up and spotted this.

We are certified wildlife habitat here so we wondered if it had just stopped by for lunch.

It was up there for over an hour so we began to wonder about it but when it attempted to fly away it was obvious that it was injured because it just dropped into the neighbors yard. It tried to get back into the yard here but the crows realized it was injured and tried to attack. Fortunately the neighbor came and they were able to put a blanket on it so they could transport it to get help.

This is my favorite photo, as I was headed out of the garden and into the house he looked right at me...and stayed there anyway.

None of us wanted to get close enough to see what sort of injury it was. Things like this are best left to the professionals. We're hoping to have more news about it soon.

It made for an exciting day because both neighbors and passers by stopped to see it and to take photos. My little garden patch gets a bit more interesting all of the time.

Finishing the Art Covered Wheelchair Ramp

It will still be a long time before the ramp is actually finished but now that the rails and big posts are painted you can see what it's going to look like.

There are still about 80 individual spindles for me to paint so that should make for an interesting winter. I may wait until spring to get it all photographed for you.