Painting again

I'm not sure what I can say about  this. It's been several finished paintings over the years but nothing I've ever been really satisfied with. I continue to relax, dream and apply new paint with a number of different things (hands, fingers, brushes, palette knives and old silverware) as I wait for a clear direction for the painting to take. In the meantime I'm just enjoying the process and always walk away relaxed and smiling.

I may be wrong but I guess I've still got sunflowers on my mind so I figured I might as well grab one of the photos I shot in my garden last summer and go with that...at least for a while.

The End of the Sunflowers

The birds and bees have more or less finished with the sunflowers so the rest seems to be keeping the squirrels and chipmunks busy.

Garden lifestyle and routine

This photo was taken along the driveway at the edge of my garden. It's a shaggy mess but I'm loving it more than ever before. The big surprise is how really tiny these multi flowering sunflowers are. I'd been expecting something
more impressive.

This is becoming a regular routine with me lately. I head out to the garden with a cup of coffee or tea and when I've relaxed a while and finished it I fill the cup with lettuce and pick enough peas to fill the saucer before I head back to the house.

The stargazer lilies are beginning to bloom and I'm really looking forward to working with them. This year I'll start with water color and then move to pencil, ink, and acrylic paints.

I'm still painting and re-arranging the patio furniture to make it a lot more pleasant to have company in the garden and to make it all about relaxing, sharing and healing in the garden.

I hope to be sharing more photos of that soon too.

Fresh Sunflowers

A friend brought me these Sunflowers yesterday.

I think I'll start by painting sunflowers on that birdhouse.

After I've done them in acrylics I'll either try pencils or watercolors next.

On the envelope I started with a sticker that came in today's mail from another friend.

I started the card with a photo, some pencils and watercolors then finished it with ink.

Here's one of the flowers I painted on the inside of the letter. I also started this one with a sticker.

Urban Sunflowers, Street View

These are along the side of my driveway.

This is just a few feet from the street.

Sunflower Scrapbook Pages

The latest garden photos

A bright welcome waits at the arbor as you enter the front yard.

The arbor itself gets a little more interesting all of the time as I add more paint and other items to it.

Although I used the same seed for all of the sunflowers here, the sunflowers in the front border are much smaller than those grown out in the back garden.

There's a lot of other work going on out front too. I'm emptying a lot of pots for the season and using the soil for some of the transplanting I want to get done before the cold weather sets in.

The fairy garden will be going indoors and be changed a bit with plants that will do better in the house. I haven't decided yet whether I'll be making changes in the furniture and accessories in it as well but I'm enjoying thinking about it and making plans.

New Sunflower photos

 
The sunflowers back here were planted later than that first bunch and make a partial privacy screen between my yard and the neighbors driveway. The nice thing about this is that they like the idea as much as I do.

These are some of the first ones shot from other angles.

The neighbors garage roof in the back of this shot makes the sunflower look like a giant!