NUMBER 15 MOOSE


Many of the moose here have numbers written on bands around their neck so Fish and Game can track them. This one was probably munching on the fireweed that probably won't be blooming in August.
I went out and painted lupine again today. I have 2 paintings in progress....looks like at least one might turn out OK. My friend Aimee went with me and painted irises which are also profuse this year.
I changed the name of this blog again. Aimee said my little watercolors aren't sketches, so now I'm calling it "Watercolor Postcards." Maybe I'd better make another blog for the other things.

White Roses and More Lupines


I painted these roses from my studio window this morning... some kind of rugosa, I think. A few years ago, I took some plants to a neighbor of my mother in Florida who grew and sold all kinds of exotic roses. She could hardly keep this one alive. It seems to like it here. As I painted the wind whipped the branch back and forth and a few petals fell off. I always seem to have an excuse for not getting things quite right.



I have no idea why this scan is smaller than the rose. The sketches are the same size, about 4x6 inches, as all the things I've posted so far are. After working at the library this afternoon, I biked down Glen's Ditch Road to where I'd heard the lupines were spectacular and they were. I think this captured them a little better than in the previous post and if its not raining tomorrow I will go back with larger paper and try again. The scan though isn't quite right in color and value either... the background of mountains is darker and more blue in the original.

LUPINES

I went out Monday, one of the very few sunny days this month, with my pastels and easel, in hopes of painting lupine. To avoid an audience, I went to Kims and after a half hour or so and 2 starts, I gave up. I've never done a successful painting of a field of lupines with watercolor and my first attempts with pastels weren't any better. I then drove down towards the beach and from the car did the little sketch here and then started a larger one of the same view. After an hour or so, I decided it wasn't worth finishing.


This is the watercolor sketch I did from the car.


Yesterday was sunny too, and I went out in front of the house and set and did these two closer up sketches. the first was drawn first with a pink Nexus pen then painted. I painted the second one without drawing first.... I think I like it best.




It rained almost all day today. Was planning to try to paint some lupines from photos I took yesterday, but the studio was such a mess, I decided to do some cleaning up instead.
After I got one surface cleared I started collaging a book cover. So much for lupines.

June 25,2006
I changed the name of this blog today from "Sketched Observations" to "Sketches and Other Things" as now I want to include more than my postcard size sketches. I had to push myself to do anything yesterday. Finally, late in the afternoon, I went and worked in the garden and then did this sketch from the yard. I've done these trees, as seen from the south windows of the house numerous times...the large spruce has an active eagle next in it. I used a different palette for this sketch and don't like the colors I came up with.



Today it rained almost all day and really hard, like it does in October. It's been raining most of the month which has not been the norm for the last few years. And the lupines are prettier than they've been for the last few years too, and not so early. The rain let up around 3 and I biked down to the beach, set on the picnic table over towards the river and did some sketches. Here's one of them, looking over towards the river. An eagle never left the post while I sketched.

June 23, 2006

Back home yesterday. Today went out with Fritz and Kate's on their new boat along with Jim, Annie, Deb, JoAnn, Connie and Eva for a tea party and whale watching. Good to see friends back in town for the summer, and what a wonderful boat!





Trip to Sitka

I got back yesterday from a trip to Sitka and Juneau. Went out on the boat with Van for a couple of days. We visited old friends Al and Sig on Berry Island, anchored in Samsing Cove where I painted this point of land 3 times and never got it right....maybe with some frisket I could have gotten the white of the tree trunks.


Tried to paint while we were trolling.... this was my best effort:

Late Thursday afternoon, June 15, my friend Judy and I started a 7 mile hike across Kruzof Island to the Shelikof Forest Service cabin. Judy's daughter Margie took us over in Judy's boat. The 7 mile hike got extended to a 10 mile hike because we took a wrong turn which seemed to be right according to the topo map we had. By the time we got the compass out and saw a mountain east of us that was south of where we should be and got back to where we took the wrong turn, we'd wasted a couple of hours. It ended up getting dark and we chose to sleep on the ground rather than try to find our way through the bear infested iris meadow.

Crossed the meadow around 5 a.m. at high tide and to the cabin in less than an hour. Beautiful, beautiful beach and woods. Pretty tired the first day, but did several sketches the second day.

Looking south from in front of the cabin. Columbine were beautiful on the little island connected to the beach.



Some treasures from the beach. the gray speckled thing is a bird egg, found in the drift line just above the surf. The tan rock is pumice which is plentiful on Kruzof.



View from the cabin window



One last sketch before dark

Never saw a bear the whole trip, but there was plenty of sign, and writings in the cabin log book attested to lots of bears in the meadow a few days previously..... I don't think they liked our singing.

My First Posted Paintings

I worked at the gallery yesterday and it was very slow. There were only 2 customers. I took a chair outside and painted these.

Shooting stars and dandelions are thick and the chocolate lilies and lupines are starting. There's more snow on the mountains than there was this time last year.

Now that I've finally figured out how to put the pictures here (it took several tries), I'm going out of town for a while. I'll be back next week and hopefully will have lots of new pictures to show.

Looking towards the bridge. I left out the turquoise house behind the willows.

Jack and Sally's house across the river

Why?

In December of last year, I made a New Year's resolution to do at least one postcard size piece of art everyday of the year. After about a week I revised that to having 30 at the end of each month. I did pretty well, was way ahead of that until last month when I started slacking off.... I probably only did about a dozen in May. A few days ago I was surfing the web and found the blog of a woman in England who challenged herself to walk a mile and do a piece of art at her desitination every day. She had done so and posted her sketches and talked about her walks on the blog daily....I can't seem to find that site again but will keep looking and hopefully find it again and give her credit for my inspiration. Blogging, it seems, helps keep the motivation going for artists. Maybe instead of just tossing the sketches into a box, by putting them here for anyone to see, by creating an audience, I'll feel some obligation to keep up my resolve.