accidental landscape

I moved all my art supplies into the garage last year to free up some room and at the same to time organize everything and supposedly make it more easily accessible. That hasn't really worked, and I am rethinking the decision to move it out there altogether. I used to browse through my various boxes of supplies, materials, trinkets and partially completed projects as a way of getting inspiration and motivation, but that isn't as easy or comfortable to do now, which is probably why I haven't been able to get motivated lately.

I decided to make a few of my pocket shrines to put on Etsy, so I was forced to go out and paw through my boxes to find the glass medallions that go on the outside, and suddenly realized why I like having my boxes close at hand - I came back in the house with the stuff to start at least 10 new projects, and, more importantly, all kinds of the enthusiasm that I have been lacking of late.

I found this piece that I did a few years ago and couldn't throw out. I used a piece of scrap canvas to test that the squirt bottle I was going to use was working, and out came this wonderful little landscape, like a Japanese calligraphy painting. It is creased, and the canvas wasn't completely gessoed so it is two colors of white where I tried to fix it, and it is just a little scrap of a painting (6x12) that can't even be stretched properly, but I keep thinking that I will find some use for it someday, so I keep it. Maybe it will find it's way into a collage....

Gerbera

I loaned my umbrella to a stranger I met in the elevator yesterday, and he brought me this beautiful flower when he returned the umbrella this morning. I suppose it was a surprise to him to be offered the use of an umbrella by a perfect stranger (well, not perfect!), but I certainly didn't expect such a response!

I used the scanner to get this image, which meant that I had to hang the flower upside down over the scanner bed. The flower had one of those little water-filled tubes on the bottom, and it kept dripping water on the scanner glass, so you can see the drips on the petals at the bottom, but I didn't want to keep trying to get a perfect image and risk killing the flower.

Life returns

Two weeks ago, everything was brown and gray, just branches and twigs and dead grass, with no signs of life. Within a week, all the buds on the trees popped out, and suddenly all the trees were fully leafed. But it was still brown and drab, and everything looked like it was dying. I spent last weekend pulling weeds from the gardens, and the soil was so dry it was powdery. It finally started to rain on Tuesday evening, and has been drizzling off and on since then.

The dust is washed away, the grass is such a flourescent color of green that it almost hurts my eyes. Glorious!


The lawn still looks patchy, but it won't be long now before it is luscious again. The spring has been SO long coming, and it has been so hard to get inspired. I can feel some of the joie de vivre returning with the rain, and I went for a long walk in the rain yesterday, just to soak it into my soul.

Creek watercolor

I was paging through the North Light Books catalogue last night, and found a demo of this beautiful little painting called Main Coast morning, so I thought I would give it a try. I left out the houses that were in the original (bad planning on my part), but I like the overall feeling of the image.