Fishing Floats

I'm really reaching for it here, LOL. This is a small 6x8 inch painting on a gessoed piece of wood. My granddaughter was over the other day and wanted to paint a "fairy house" (small decorative birdhouse). She loves to paint these little birdhouses so I buy some periodically from Michael's. 

They are painted with acrylics, student grade - not my expensive acrylics! But I still tell her to try not to waste the paint. However she tends to put big blobs on the palette. So I sat with her and picked up my board, and began streaking paints across it to use up her extra colors. 

"Oh, are you painting the ocean?" she asked me? Well the colors were mostly ocean-like and I was sort of streaking in a wavy pattern, so I decided it WAS the ocean, We also have a lot "jewels" - which come from Michael's also and can be glued onto craft projects. My granddaughter loves to attach jewels to her fairy houses and she felt my painting needed jewels too,

So I used the smooth ones rather than faceted ones, and decided they looked like old blown-glass fishing floats that used to be used, primarily in Japan, in the early 20th century. My mom used to have a collection of these that I remember from my childhood. 

So for fun I created "Fishing Floats". Hey, at least I did something! 

And here is my granddaughter's Fairy House. I didn't use the pink in my ocean but did use all her other color choices. 

Strange Days - Part II

Strange days continued on into May. I did slow down some in May, not even sketching as much, as even quicker wonky sketches, but something at least. 

 Three minutes sketching mug and French press while the decaf brewed.

Our challenge was to draw a hat. Another three minutes while the decaf brewed.

Challenge was to draw your favorite mug. I like this mug because it shows my passion for birding!

My avocado plant again. It's grown quite a bit since the last time I sketched it.

A rainy day, sitting out on my back porch watching the few hardy birds at the feeders and water splashing into the pond. Just a sketch looking out at my back yard.

Life is Strange

Life became very strange after my previous post and suddenly I've been mostly home and self-isolating since the advent of the Covid19 Coronavirus. Being home seems like it would give me lots of time to paint but that hasn't actually been the case. I've been stressed and freaked out. However I do belong to a couple Facebook groups encouraging sketching as good practice. I should really do it every day and started out with good intentions but that hasn't worked out either. But I HAVE done some sketching. All very quick. 3-8 minutes max. It seems about all I can manage, but it's something, so here are sketches I did during the month of April.

Our challenge for this day was to draw shoes, so I did one attached to my own foot.

I'm an avid birder. These are the binoculars I use to watch the birds in my yard.

I'm also an avid reader. This is a stack of bird references however.

A little avocado plant I started from a pit way back at Christmastime, but it seems to be growing.

Our challenge here was to draw some of our art supplies. I drew some but I'm not exactly using them much!

My "big" camera. I use my iPhone more than anything, but this is the one with the 60X optical zoom that I use to get bird photos.

A little watering can  for the plants I try to grow though I have such a black thumb it's usually useless.