I did this one shortly before my trip to Virginia, but looks like I forgot to mention it!  It's another slide show, this one without music, to see if that adds or detracts from the demo...

Feedback is welcome, as always...you can even comment or give it a rating, right on the YouTube site, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfAO6OCqrUo

I'm working on a couple now on super-simple sketchbook binding, accordion style...unfortunately, of course, my new one was lost with my suitcase, as I mentioned before, so I don't have any new work in it to show...

And still trying to figure out what's up with the video editing codec that didn't help when I downloaded it, siiigh...

I've been talking to dear friends Paul Clark and Dana Dietrich at Serious Vanity Music Group--some really great music here, and it would be wonderful to get a piece licensed to me for use in the videos--if I'm going to do serious, professional work, I need to make sure to go through channels properly, and do it right!  Dana and Paul are both incredibly talented young people--they'll knock your socks off!  Check out Dana's blog at http://www.retributiongirl.com/ and click on the music in "The Jukebox of Love."  #8 is my current fave...

Or look at their updated site, at www.seriousvanity.com--WAY talented...

...I wanted to show my godson what I'd like for the new porch steps, so did this little painting in my journal...of course, that's my sweet Joseph going up the stairs, with the lovely Sarah in the background...

We've been working on this for just over a full year now, and it finally feels like we might get done, someday! Here's the latest in the rehab pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9506220@N08/ You can see, we're actually PAINTING now!

The old back porch and rotting bathroom are gone now, too, and we'll be having the new one rebuilt this week--porch, that is, not bathroom...

This is exciting!

...I had a visit from my town's Code Enforcement Officer the other day. With all the mess we've had around here for the last year of rehabbing next door, plus my falling-down fence (now in the process of replacing) and other eyesores, I had been expecting that, almost. I once got a citation because my wildflower yard (which seeds had been given to me by the City Manager) exceeded 18" in height. (Yes, interdepartmental communication WOULD be nice...) You can see Mark at work, yesterday, beginning some serious cleanup...

But what do you think I got a warning for, this time? The junk pile Mark is hauling off? The fence mess? The house next door in sore need of paint?

No. My Jeep was parked with its tires just over on the grass of the parkward. (Which I am responsible for mowing, I might add...) Fine, so now I'm parked well out in the street...I make a lovely target...

Well, we ARE thinking of putting in an off-street driveway, in the lot next door.

Want to hear something ELSE weird? City ordinance, last I heard, called for concrete or blacktop, and forbade gravel. In a flood town. Where you don't WANT more runoff...

Sometimes you just sit and shake your head in amazement...

And this one actually has music...and some captions I couldn't fix... >:-{

--if I put the title before or after a graphic, I can delete, move, or edit it just fine, but if I superimpose it on an image and then add a new piece in front? The text stays where it was in the sequence of the whole slide show, and not on the art you put it on! And I can't seem to find how to change or delete them, they're like ghosts! (Someone told me to click on the + on the offending image...there isn't one. And no place to see "edit caption" either...)

It's hard to find music you like, that's the right length, and that's a free download! I think this works, though...it's from Celtic Shores 2, pretty and not too distracting. I had to use two separate pieces, because the ones that would have been long enough weren't free downloads...

...so not exactly seamless, here, but I'm learning a lot! Maybe you CAN teach old dogs new...well, you know.




If it's easier, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-qUmsSBHXs

I'd love to be able to edit video clips, but so far I've downloaded the necessary codec and it still doesn't work...

...and this was strictly practice--my first one, as a slide show! (Still need to figure out codecs and how to import the videos my camera will shoot into Windows Movie Maker...) Needs sound, doesn't it!?

No idea if imbedding it here will work or not...

Sometimes I've just been working so hard or juggling so much (new book contract!) or find myself so frustrated with the long drawn-out progress of our rehab projects (I SO want to finish SOMETHING--we started a year ago April!) that I have to run away from home to feed my soul. Saturday I went out to Watkins Mill State Historic Site in the afternoon, after waiting half a day for my workmen to show up, but all the while I was there, ! kept thinking about that lovely little gravel road I keep fetching up on, south of town.

So Sunday I packed up and went there to see how spring was treating it...and I was glad I did. It was wonderful. I painted one more springlike piece in my journal on the same page with my grocery list, here:

...but then decided to try those wonderful aged, angular rooflines that have called my name for months. Funny, this one didn't end up with spring green grass at all--it felt as if it would distract the eye--so I renewed my artistic license and just left that bit out...for now.

I'd painted the journal sketch sitting on a folding stool by the road, in front of the Jeep--and in full sunlight, getting a wonderful case of the equivalent of snowblindness, so for this one I moved back inside the car to contend with the steering wheel instead of the glare of sunlight on white paper!  Most people who drove by were very considerate when they saw me working at the verge of the gravel road, but I did get well dusted by one gentleman in a heck of a hurry--at least in the Jeep you're safe from flying gravel!

First, I sketched in the bare bones with my mechanical pencil, then used my 1" flat brush to lay in the soft sky color, the drybrush cedar tree, and the blue-grays of the old tin and cinderblock walls, with refreshment at hand, as you can see. The rough Saunders Waterford paper worked really well to suggest the broken, lacy cedar tree.



Then, I warmed to the task (this stuff is so exciting, if you're a fanatic like I am!) and began to the things that had caught my eye in the first place, those gorgeous rusty roofs...mostly in Burnt Sienna, Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet, and Ultramarine Blue, mixed on the paper, still using a flat, but a 1/2" now. I began to add details of the windows and texture as washes dried.

This is as far as I got, on the spot:

...the details of the weathered tin roofs, the texture of the siding, and that second cedar tree.

Back home, I added a few more details and scanned the finished piece that appears at the top of this post.
; the scanner picks up more of the warm color of the paper.  And so far, I still don't want to add a lot of color in the grass, feeling it would draw the eye, so it's either vignetted or snow, take your pick! Let's hear it for artistic license...

And then, other vistas down the road tugged at me...more on those anon!

...I just drove through East Valley Park on my way home from the postoffice--it contains a Missouri Natural Area called Isley Park Woods, and an amazing display of spring wildflowers every April.

I've already missed almost all the bloodroot, but pale corydalis, spring beauties, bellwort, false rue anemone and dogtooth violet are in abundance...and I want to PAINT them! Nothing was blooming over the weekend--that I could see from the road, anyway--or I would have started then. My guess is that the bloodroot flowers were hiding under those big umbrella leaves; I found one that hadn't bloomed yet, so I'll try for it tomorrow...

So much to do, so little time...

...is whoever invented Ibuprofen!

I've been doing lots of organizing and cleaning and throwing away the last week or so. I'm not much of a housekeeper, I'm usually entirely too busy, and I do tend to hoard (hey, you never know when you might NEED that whatever-it-is, and besides as a freelancer I'm always aware that #1, the money can stop at any time, #2, I might make something out of that that I could sell, and #3, I just KNOW that would be really cool in a collage if I ever get back to making collages...

But my sweet mother-in-law makes me look like a piker in the hoarding department. That amazing, strong woman grew up in an orphanage, which may have something to do with it, and I'm not sure she's thrown out ANYTHING that can be of use in 57 years of marriage and 50 of living in the same house. (That is, unless kateslover has instigated one of his cleanups! He is GREAT at that...)

One of the jobs we did while we were there--pretty much whenever we weren't at the hospital--was to find, organize, clean, pass along or throw out a small mountain of stuff. More free address labels than anyone could use in a lifetime, long expired food in the fridge, piles of religious medals and cards taken to her church (at her request) and great masses of stuff just tossed--also at her request.

It inspired me, let me tell you. I've been doing likewise since I've been back--in the house, in the shed, even in my Jeep. No wonder my back hurts like crazy, but I'm beginning to discover flat surfaces I forgot I had...

Of course part of this is in preparation for Joseph's move here--I'd like for him not to have to deal with too much of this dreck here, too. It's also nice to have my art supplies in better order...I found a whole bin of sketchbooks and watercolor blocks I'd forgotten I had (and ordered more, siiiigh, since I couldn't find these!)

I swear the faeries hide things on me, too! When I was working on the painting below and the new article for Watercolor Artist on Natural Pigments' mineral paints, I really wanted to find my cache of Daniel Smith Primateks for comparison. They were NOWHERE in this house. I was sure I had passed them along to my brother in law, prizewinning Nevada artist Richard Busey, since he enjoys experimenting, too.





So weeks too late, what should show up yesterday right where I had looked at least twice already? You guessed it, the Primateks.

So today, after my next round of work and cleanup, I experiment! Right after the Ibuprofen take effect...

Tags: arthritis, housecleaning, ibuprofen, mineral paints, watercolors

This has been a subject on the EDM (Everyday Matters) Yahoogroup lately, and we've touched on it in my Painting Plein Air group pool on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/plein_aire/, but I'm wondering how other plein air painters handle it. It depends a great deal on my mood and why I'm doing what I'm doing--sometimes I desperately need to be out alone, and when that is the case I really should have sense enough to find someplace less populous or paint from my Jeep.

Recently someone on EDM said that if it's a kid, they have extra paints and materials so the kid can paint too--I've known other artists who do that, and after a prolonged conversation with a little neighbor girl last night, I'm thinking of doing likewise. She actually asked me if she could paint too, but I wasn't prepared, just then.

That extra box of modern Prangs, a couple of inexpensive brushes and a pad of paper wouldn't be amiss, unless I'm in "travel light" mode. I'm thinking a big Ziplock bag by the front door would be OK.

Perhaps it would make a difference in a child's life, particularly one at risk, as this one definitely is. kateslover thinks so, and he got me thinking, last night.

She told me her daddy is in jail, and that she thought it was all right to take anything she wanted, no matter who it belonged to...on her OWN way to juvie, at 8, unless something happens to change that bleak future. I may be putting too much faith in art--but then, I may not.

I put in a fair amount of time working with kids at the detention camp at Watkins Mill some years ago--it was satisfying work, but I'm a lot older and a LOT more tired now, and I'll admit this is a seriously daunting idea for me! Still, I wonder...

When it's just someone passing by as we paint, though...comments like "my son can paint just like a photo, what do you think he should do?" (Um, keep painting?) or the one that really nonpluses me, "are you painting?" or "are you an artist?" Not sure what on earth to say to that.

I believe it's just a way to make contact, to break the ice, but the word that springs to mind is "DUH." Not exactly polite...

Of course when the comment is a simple "that's nice!" it's easy to just say thank you and keep working...when it's a kid or a teenager (I've always gotten along well with teenagers, for some reason) I usually ask them if they like to paint, and we get into a conversation.  I've had several nice talks with kids that looked like young gang members; people in my town tend to get nervous around them, and in groups they do tend to try to act tough, but I've had a whole circle of young guys gathered around me while I sat on the sidewalk painting and talking art.  One of them came up to me recently and asked if I remembered him from a couple of years back, doing just that...

I've done a lot of demos in public and for workshops, but when I'm Out There, painting plein air, it's generally for my own sanity. ;-) No wonder I try to seek out deserted places...that's how I ended up painting the road over the dam at Rocky Hollow the other day--there was no one else there.

So, artists...how do you feel about it? Do you want to be noticed? Do you enjoy the interaction? Do you prefer to be left alone? Do you feel threatened? Do you try to stay aware of your surroundings and the situation, as you should? Are you shy about your work? Do you want comments, or not?

How do you handle the occasional verbal onlooker?

Tags: comments, observors, painting, plein air