Lilly

As you can see, I decided to leave my kitty white, and since she looks just like one of my daughter's cats that we kept for her a while, this is "Lilly". I'll live with all that fur for a day or two as there may be some fiddling called for here and there, but basically I think this one is done. I did want to paint my calico, Neiman, next and it will be a larger size. This one will frame up 12x12 as it definitely calls for a square foremat. This is also pretty loose for my hand, but it was fun to paint...just had to back off my penchant for detail.

Cat - WIP

This is a new little painting I've started at our art retreat. I can't make up my mind whether to make this sweetiepie a white kitty or make her Neiman (my gorgeous Calico who is really a Miss Neiman Marcus...she's very prissey and just knows that she's a queen bee). The background is going to be turquoise/greeny/blue and when I started that I decided that I didn't want to work all that fur, so that's the reason I went to the masking. We'll see how it goes from here.

Lost Art???

Okay...it's not "real" art, but it's becoming a lost art. When my granddaughter was here over the weekend (she's 5) she was extolling the joys of the Food Network and Iron Chef and all that new fangled stuff. I told her that I had a cookbook that I wanted her to see that my mother gave to me and when we opened it, it fell to the pie section. So...we baked this apple pie. We peeled the apples (and yes, I can peel one without the peel breaking like in "When Sally Met Harry"), mixed the sugary stuff with spices, made the crust from scratch (rolled it out with an ancient rolling pin)...my husband and daughter couldn't believe it. Oh, what we do for our grandchildren. And, oh, what a mess we made on the kitchen counter! Anyway, just wanted you guys to know that the ole gal still has it when it comes to baking a yummy pie.

Kathleen Alexander Workshop

What a fabulous watercolor workshop we've just finished here in Noonday. Our wonderful teacher, Kathleen Alexander from California, was not only very generous with her painting techniques and color theories, but is so pretty and friendly and immediately put us at ease. This was Kathleen's first visit to Texas and she said that she was very surprised at how green and lush our Tyler, Texas locale was in comparison to what people usually think they'll find in Texas. Of course, we ordered perfect weather for our guest.

I've posted a photo of Kathleen and myself, and of my painting (not quite finished yet) from the workshop. We started a second painting of a waterlily, but didn't get far enough along for me to post quite yet. Both were so much fun to paint, and we all loved the techniques Kathleen taught.

My painting of the Hawaiian plumerias lacks cleaning up and softening some edges and lifting out a bit of the heavy color on the buds there on the left, but all in all, I'm very happy with the translucent qualities I have miraculously achieved. As most of you know who follow my blog. I do have a rather heavy hand when it comes to applying color. I also have a new appreciation for green-gold, shadow green, and winsor orange(red shade). Kathleen brought some of her work along for us to see and her use of color simply blew us all away. We definitely want her to come back next year if she can work us into her very busy schedule.

Colors of Fall

Have you ever wanted to paint something for the sheer joy of painting with colors that don't necessarily go where you put them and don't necessarily go with what you're painting? I wanted to do something "fallish", and didn't want to paint corn or flowers or pumpkins so I came up with this pomegranete and it was such fun. Windows aren't magenta and gamboge...but mine are. Dishes don't have magenta shadows for no reason...but mine does. The background is of just about everything on my pallete that was on the warm side. I'm getting ready to do a 3 day workshop with Kathleen Alexander this week, and the palette we'll be using is not the usual rather gaudy hues I enjoy (it's going to be very tame I think), so I thought I'd be good and use up my wild colors today. I'll be serious about colors tomorrow...maybe.