Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Daily Paintings

Here are all 5 daily paintings from last week...







And in case YOUR garden is overflowing too, here is a great marinade recipe for veggie kabobs:
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves of garlic (chopped)
salt and pepper to taste

Marinate veggies in sauce for about 20 minutes and place on skewers (remember to soak wooden skewers in water for 30 minutes before grilling!). Grill on medium heat for about 20 minutes, basting occasionally with leftover sauce.

I had enough marinade leftover to pour on top of a veggie pasta dish the next day.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Try again...

It was probably a bit optimistic of me to start the whole Daily Painting project the week we had my grandma's memorial service and out of towners flying in to stay with us for the weekend. So I forgave myself and started over this week. And hopefully by tomorrow I'll be feeling like an artist again. The past two days I've been feeling very uninspired and not too thrilled with my work. But I painted anyway and I'll post later. In the meantime, you can enjoy this picture of my studio friend that I have been trying to photograph all summer. She's very timid.



Don't know why I can't find anything to paint when I'm surrounded by this all day...



And here are a few images from the weekend. We all went for a nice walk after the memorial and we got some pretty good family photos. It takes a few tries to get good kid shots, though. B likes to help out by holding the other kids down by their heads, but he wasn't holding down the right person. This is one of about four shots that look almost the same. G thinks it's pretty funny to jump up as soon as we're ready to take the picture.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Daily Painting: Day 2


So I put off my daily painting even later yesterday and this is what the sky looked like while I was working. And now I have even more to distract me now that this arrived in the mail:

Link
It's a sketchbook from the Hand-Book Journal Co. that I discovered on Geninne's Art Blog and then ordered from Dick Blick. It's hard to find a nice book that will take watercolor that doesn't have the big, thick watercolor paper, but this one is supposed to be able to handle it. We will see!

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Daily Painting: Day 1


Here is my first of 15 daily paintings. I spent a good portion of the morning yesterday harvesting and freezing beans. Of course, this meant I had to put off painting until the last minute of the day. Procrastination is my true art.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Just do it!

Ok. I'm finally going to open an etsy shop. If I write it down publicly, will I actually do it? We'll see. I don't have a huge amount of traffic here yet, so there will only be a few people to hold me accountable. So here is my big plan for this week:
Open the Etsy shop
Get the web page up and running
Take the Painting a Day challenge
Host a giveaway (really looking forward to this one)!

The Etsy shop I hope to have open by the end of today. As I am pretty computer-challenged, this is going to be a big deal if it happens, but that's the plan. I've been a member of Etsy for a long time, but have just never gotten around to putting any items in the shop. I'm tired of thinking about it. It's time to make it happen.
The web page requires a lot of help from the husband, so I have to be a little more flexible with that.
The Painting a Day Challenge... I've seen a lot of artist that participate in this. I am going to bend the rules a little since this is my first time. My challenge for myself will be to create 15 painting over the course of three weeks- one a day on the weekdays. I will be starting tomorrow. I am a little scared.
The giveaway is probably my favorite... What I'd like to do is give away a print of one of the daily paintings at the end of the three weeks. I will give out more details on that later.
So that's that. I guess I'd beeter head over to Etsy and see what I need to do!




Putting the gesso on the masonary panels for the Painting a Day challenge



Putting on the second coat of gesso and watching Martha Stewart. She would have these all done with 5 coats and would probably OWN Etsy before I even figure out how to post anything.