Strawberries

I was feeling guilty because the painting I entered last year in the "Nutrition" category of the USDA employee art show featured Linnea eating a cupcake! For this year's show I wanted to enter something more nutritious! These painting hang on the walls of USDA's South Building for about a year. The photo reference was snapped at a family gathering where we suddenly noticed that Linnea was taking a bite out of every strawberry then moving on to the next from a big bowl.

Cousins Playing Dress Up

I've been doing more sketching than painting but over a three day weekend was able to complete a "real" painting of my 2 oldest granddaughters playing dress up.

Self Portrait

I'm not really much for self-portraits but if you want to practice improving your technique you are the one who is always there. What I am still doing is art journaling, where the entries are pencil, pen, ink, watercolor or any combination of these. Trying to get the watercolors a little looser, with more interesting colors - still a ways to go!

Art Journal

I'm having a lot of fun with the Art Journal thing. Early dismissal from work today means I got to sketch around the National Mall and try out a little travel watercolor set I made from a mints tin.

To make the watercolor set, I filled the tin with a layer of white sculpy and made depressions for the colors and for mixing spaces. You bake scuply at 275 for 15 minutes and you're done. I also had to trim a paintbrush handle so it would fit.

Africa Travel Art Journal

One of the funnest things I did in Africa was to create an Art Travel Journal of the things I saw. My pages are below:

Watercolor Portraits

For fun I am trying to paint some watercolor portraits. I find this much trickier than doing it in oil. The one was painted of Willow the day before her third birthday.

Pan

I hadn't done any watercolor for a long time. I bought a little travel water color set and decided to try it out starting with a statue of Pan that stands in the garden at the Alice Ferguson Foundation.