Category: Uncategorized

Happy Sunday! Pfew! It’s a scorcher out there! I shouldn’t complain though–the firefighters that have been working so hard to put out the fires in Colorado and Wyoming have it much, much hotter than I do!

Aside from the heat, it was (and still is) a gorgeous, sunny day–perfect for a little photography adventure!

For today’s challenge, I focused on the textures around me. While I found several interesting textures in the dirt, grass, and leaves, I was definitely drawn to bark textures. Here are a few photographs from my venture that inspired my watercolor explorations:

Based on these photographs of bark textures, I then explored the watercolor techniques from Day One and Day Two of the challenge. Here is my resulting mini-work:

For tomorrow’s challenge, focus on SHADOWS. This time, take your paper outside with you, collecting shadows on your paper to create an interesting composition. Depending on the…

I’m a sucker for special effects, so today’s challenge proved to be a fun and exciting one! Using regular table salt, the tip of a mechanical pencil (no lead), and a plastic square that I scrounged up from my odds and ends drawer, I painted the following picture:

All of the dotted areas (mostly on the left side) are the result of the table salt. The trees, branches, and grass were created using the sgraffito techniques, and paper towel was used for reverse printmaking on the ground. Not only was it a lot of fun to explore these special effects, but it also gave me a lot of great ideas for ways that each can be used for my nature explorations! (I could definitely see the “magic” factor of the salt (or rubbing alcohol) going over well with my students!)

For tomorrow’s challenge, explore a natural texture that you find…

Happy Friday night! Thank goodness the first day of this challenge was a quick one–as I spent the majority of my day apartment hunting! Nevertheless, the small amount of time spent exploring watercolor painting was worthwhile.

Here is the result of today’s explorations:

I had a wonderful time exploring different texture possibilities and types of washes using small thumbnail-sized boxes for my experimenting.

For tomorrow’s challenge, explore some special effects that can be achieved using items such as paper towels, salt, and the scratching effects that can be achieved through the sgrafitto technique.

Enjoy tomorrows explorations! Have fun with the process! Tomorrow will be the last day of paint technique explorations before we head out to explore the natural world through watercolor!

‘Til tomorrow…happy explorations!

I was lucky enough to travel to the seashore this weekend.  Like all of the other little kids, I found myself filling my pockets with seashells.  Today as the sun shone brightly throughout the house, I took photos of the shells in a series of different poses, so to speak.  As with the sunflowers mentioned earlier, I leaned toward the abstract.  Still working with the images, but here are few.  We’ll see what the rest of the summer holds in store.

Lately I have been struggling with photography.  If you’ve read through more than a few of my posts you’ll see I’m kind of everywhere.  Nature, urbex, architecture, portraiture… it’s because much like nurses will work in different specialties to find their passion I have had to do the same thing to figure out where I want to spend my energies.  There are thousands of mediocre photographers and I just don’t *do* mediocre.  Uninspired attitude begets uninspired photographs and I just don’t want to publish mediocre work.

My biggest problem has been wanting more from photographs.  Yes, that’s a cool abandoned prison, that’s a pretty flower, that’s a nice landscape but I’m feeling la-di-dah about it.  A unique angle, a well-lit subject, a neat camera effect is desirable but I want more of me in my work and I’m not talking self portraits.

Today I came across the work of Kristy…

I have been having great difficulty photographing sunflowers.  Somehow the image of the whole flower is never quite right.  Finally I decided to stop worrying about the mythic image and enjoy the beauty of the abstract.