The Veggie Garden as Art

On this day the first order of business is seeing what there was for lunch.There were pea pods and lettuce for salad. Black raspberries for dessert, some eaten fresh and later in the day some cooked a bit with strawberries and served over ice cream. The green and yellow beans were cooked up with some carrots for supper.

I admire those people who can make entire meals from their gardens but a few containers in the city aren't likely to get me there anytime soon.

Still, I do what I can and feel better for the effort.

After lunch I looked over the photos and was struck by the beauty of the contrasting shapes and colors.

I began to see some artistic possibilities and reached for my watercolors.

I did these raspberries on the corner of an envelope as I was answering mail to a friend who is interested in my garden.

I decided to include the photo to make my first card fast and easy.

  Here you see the photo and watercolor combined. After I got to this point I grabbed a black pen to do some outlining and define the idea a bit more.

I liked it better after that. What do you think? Did I take it too far?

Mustang, something new for me

Someone I care about really likes mustangs so I'm attempting to learn to draw and paint them as a surprise.

I'm off to an awkward start, I'm not quite happy with the pose  but I based it on clip art we found on the internet. I tried several different pencils in both regular and watercolor. I wasn't quite happy with with the rough texture on the body so I washed it over with a light mix of watercolor paints.

Clearly it's a project that will take a while to learn. if nothing else I'm hoping the effort will be appreciated.

Either way it stretched me out of my comfort zone and that's always a good thing. 

Getting a Slow Start to the New Year

I'll bet you're wondering why there hasn't been a new post here in a while. The best explanation is that after putting the Christmas decorations away I decided to make a few more dala horse ornaments for next year and got caught up in designing, carving and painting more horses. You can read more about that on my dala horse blog or going to my zazzle stores to see how many of them became product designs.

There was a recovery period after working on the horses. Both because of a slip with my carving knife and increasing arthritis. I'm sure age and injuries slow a lot of us down these days. Thank goodness we all do our best to cope with everything and keep doing the things that are important to us.

If and when my hands recover enough I'll get back to drawing and painting again. In the mean time I've been putting some of my older work on products on zazzle. There are ways to minimize the amount of typing you need to do so you can continue to use your creativity in other ways.

What are some of the ways that you express your creativity?

Takiing some time between projects

Not much going on as far as art goes the last few days, just a bit of sketching on the corners of envelopes as I sent out some Easter Cards. I mostly did variations of little egg designs on most of them as I experimented with different color combinations.

On the computer I've been designing a line of clothing in classic styled black and white floral patterns.

In between things I've had a few folks in for tea.

I also took some time to repaint one of the laths on the arbor in the front yard. I plan to paint sections of it to go with the posts on the wheelchair ramp.

It's not only a grand entrance to the house but a bit of a resume' for anyone interested in painting here...and an opportunity to join in and stay for the fun.

What to do when you're running out of art supplies

1. When you're out of colors that you want mix them

2, when you run out of things to mix them with, switch media.

I start working by doing paintings with tube acrylic paints, when I run out of those I go back to using bottle acrylics on wood with either furniture projects, bird houses, boxes or dala horses.

When I run out of those there's always watercolors or colored pencils on a variety of different papers.

If I run out of those too it's on to found objects or junk mail. the main thing is that if you're motivated enough there's always a way to do something creative.

 Don't wait for that perfect moment or think that you have to have something special to work with, just live in the moment and grab whatever you've got to make your world a better place.