Shorebird in Watercolor Handmade Sketchbook 5.5 x 5.5 inches

Cold weather getting you down?! Gray days piling up on you? Well.......come and take an "Imaginary Trip to the Beach!" Feel the warm, gentle breezes blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico, sink your toes in the sand, watch the waterbirds race along the edge of the waves and forget about all that snow!

Please click here for more information on the trip! We're leaving tomorrow, so hurry!

Watercolor of St. Patrick's Cross Handbook Watercolor Sketchbook 3.5 x 8.5 inches

All aboard for An Imaginary Trip to Ireland!! 'Tis wet, cold and windy in Ireland today,* but oh, the beauty of such a wind-swept land! Complete with ruins, leprechauns tales of old, and legends of giants, the Emerald Isle is destination not to be missed. 


Come and join me on a glorious imaginary trip through this wonderful country. We leave* on January 31st and return* on March 10th. We'll be sketching the gorgeous coast and castle ruins as well as in the modern city of Dublin. For more information about the trip, please visit here.


Let me know if I can answer any questions.


Thanks!


*We're not really in Ireland and we're not actually leaving as this is all "imaginary!!"

2 minute sketches from Davis Park Watercolor and Ink Handbook Watercolor Sketchbook

I've been itching to get outside. Between the inclement weather and inside obligations, I've been having a tough time getting there. Yesterday, I had a small window of time and went to Davis Park. It's not the most scenic of places, but it was outside and that was the main requirement. The other reason I wanted to get outside was so I could move. As in walk!

I admire the artists that I see posting sketches from their daily walkabouts. They call it "sketchercise" or something like that. I find myself in a state of struggle whenever I try to sketch when I'm out walking (for the purposes of exercise) and I think it shows in the sketches above. What I want to sketch doesn't generally show up an area or at a time when I'd be willing to stop. Going back to those areas would mean another loop and I didn't have the time.

My "solution" was to impose a 2-minute time limit on myself—IF I was going to try and accomplish both tasks. Sigh. Although I can't say that the sketching was all that successful, I do feel better having been out in the gale force winds, letting it blow some of the cobwebs in my brain around.

The frost-burnt oak leaves truly glowed in the intermittent sun. I heard the call of the redwing black bird as well as saw and heard a pair of Sandhill Cranes. I may have seen a vireo but am not sure if that's what it was.

Sketching aside, it was pure bliss for the few minutes I was out there!

....is now posted over on the 100 Paintings Challenge Blog! Please be sure to check it out for some wonderful inspiration as well as Elva's blog, Elva's Field Notes!

Oregon Coast by Elva Paulson watercolor and ink

You'll find the first part of the interview here!

Bison by Elva Paulson pen, ink and watercolor wash

My first carved stamp - Fleur-de-lis! The second was the leaf motif.

...But you have to know how!"

The quote is from Dr. Seuss' The Cat In The Hat book, and could not be more right. I was reintroduced to the quote reading Gretchen Rubin's blog, The Happiness Project, with a book by the same name. This particular post deals with what we think *should* be fun vs. what is really fun to us as individuals. The two are not necessarily the same thing.

On Friday, I had an opportunity to meet up with a friend for lunch. One of the first fun things I've done in the last two weeks. Those weeks have included technology nightmares along the lines of hard drive disk failure....while talking, the realization crystalized before my eyes that I hadn't been having much fun lately! (Gosh, really?! Sometimes it takes a smack from the obvious for me to take notice of said obvious!)
Since it was Friday and I was going to be without my computer for a while, I decided I needed to have some "fun." Oh my goodness....I was rather lost. What was fun? What did I want to do? I had no idea! I retreated to the office and got on the (old) computer and started surfacing the 'net. Fun? No. Procrastination.

I stumbled across a post by Aimee of Artsyville about carving inexpensive erasers from the dollar store into stamps and thought, "Hey, that sounds like fun!" Almost as quickly I dismissed the idea as I don't really use stamps in my artwork. What caught and held my attention was her comment about needing a mindset switch. Something totally different from what I normally do. And a switch it definitely was!

More stamps carved from erasers from the dollar store!

Long story made shorter, I needed to go to the library on Saturday...the dollar store was on the way....so now I had the erasers. I already had several Xacto® knives so I was good to go. When Chris saw my project he mentioned an Xacto set he'd given me some time back that had carving tools in it—score! I was set to carve my heart out and I did!

The other thing that started me on this path was my recent trip to NOLA....I brought back a wine cork from a bottle of wine Kathy of Catching Happiness and I shared while there. I had the wild idea of turning it into a stamp.....and I did! With a NOLA motif, no less....(KJ, one of these is for you!)

The two fleur-de-lis stamps are from the same cork. The bird on the right is the first synthetic cork I carved. The swirls on the bottom stamped bird were done with a gel ink pen.

Well, one fun idea leads to another and another and soon I was carving more wine corks except these were the synthetic corks made from a thermoplastic elastomer. Such fun! I had three of these synthetic corks and all had slightly different properties that gave varying results!

I have to say this was great fun and it felt good great to fill the "well" rather than to constantly draw from it. Next, I'll be to integrating some of the designs into my sketchbooks! More fun!

Two more synthetic corks with their carvings

So what do you find fun and do for fun—just for you?!! Please sure....I need to have more fun!

P.S. If you decide to try this, be very, very, very, very careful with sharp instruments.....just sayin'......

Please join me over at the 100 Paintings Challenge Blog for a wonderfully inspiring interview with Elva Paulson! Elva has just completed the challenge and shares a bit about the long and winding road she's traveled to where she is today.

Amanita by Elva Paulson watercolor

You'll find more of Elva's wonderful stories over on her personal blog, Elva's Field Notes. Do be sure to stop by—you won't be disappointed!

Foggy Woods by Elva Paulson acrylic

Memory Sketch of the Loooong Toenails

As an artist, if you observe well, you will be amazed at what you see. You may also be amazed at what your brain finds fascinating and will NOT leave alone even though there's no good reason to dwell on it!

The foot above is a memory sketch of a young woman's foot from the restaurant where I had lunch yesterday. The memory sketch is not the best, but it captured my fascination with her toenails—French manicure and all! Now, this is Florida and we wear sandals almost all year round so seeing toenails painted in exotic colors and with elaborate detail is not unusual.

What was unusual was the length of her toenails. They must have extended at least a quarter of an inch (6mm) PAST the end of her toes!!! They looked far more like fingernails than toenails and I found myself totally captivated.

As I traveled through the rest of the day, my thoughts kept returning to her toes. I had questions. Many questions, but since she was a complete stranger to me, I don't think she would have appreciated me showing up tableside to ask her.

I wanted to know if she had trouble wearing closed toed shoes, did she ever wear close toed shoes and how long did it take to grow toenails that long?! Did she have trouble with them breaking or with ingrown toenails? Yes, vulgar, I know, but I did wonder.

Too-late-to-be-sketching-at-night sketch of my own foot

Still thinking about those toenails at 11:00 last night, I decided to sketch my own foot, giving myself really long toenails. And before you ask, no my foot is not that misshaped. This is what comes of sketching too late at night rather than going to bed after a long day! Unfortunately, it did nothing to resolve my questions or curiosity.

AND because I was so totally fascinated with the long toenails, I just had to share as I knew you'd want to know too!! ;•)  


P.S. When Chris observed the scans of the two sketches, he remarked that it "appeared" as if the feet were actually stomping on the paper because of the wrinkles from the water and the way the paper dried!

I'm in the mood for hearts! Can you tell?! The new blog header was inspired by a necklace I purchased on my recent trip to NOLA—it's made up of all kinds of hearts, both brass and glass. These are the same chickadees that were in the last header with the letters strung across between them. I painted the hearts in watercolor on a separate piece of paper. Then digitally, I added them to the "rope" between the birds!

Hope you like them!

I love a "play on words" and when I heard the words "love reigns" it sparked an artistic thought that led to a painted thought in my journal. This is what I started with:

 I liked the idea of the hearts floating down as if it were raining. I decided to go a bit further with this but realized my idea wasn't going to work the way I currently had journal positioned. I turned it counter clockwise one step so that "Love Reigns" now ran along the side rather than the top. Then I added the words "Love Grows" on the opposite side going down the left side:
When I first "conceptualized" this piece, my thoughts ran along the lines of what works with rain/reign besides falling rain or hearts and my answer was an umbrella. But rather than having the umbrella protecting something from rain/love, I turned the piece over to "catch" all the love pouring down:
When I put the three elements together on the page and added the word "Where" on the left side, this is what the finished page looked like:
Another cool thing about this is that I can break the elements apart and use them to create a Valentine Day card! The finished size of the page is 5.5 inches square which is not a standard card size. By using my scanner and photo editing software, I can easily downsize and rearrange the art to fit on any size card I want it to! Interested in learning more? Come join me for the Valentine Cards eClass starting tomorrow, January 18th! More information here.