Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I Am Le Tired

Yesterday was Quite A Day, let me tell you. It started normally enough - took a shower, drank some coffee, chatted with my guy, and started to get ready to finish the shrug I was working on...

And my mother told me to get ready for an adventure with the cat!

I'm always down for a kitty trip, so I threw on some Tromping Around Clothes (I'd changed back into pajamas after my shower, not anticipating the surprise adventure), and came down to find a paper bag on the counter.

The plan was thus:

• Grab the cat and the paper bag, get in the car.
• Head to the Wal-Mart for some forgotten bread and a box of tissues
• Head to the next town over to drop off some Vicks, cold medicine, and tissues for my guy, who has a chest cold (Feel Better, Love!)
• Find a beach that was open and not too crowded.

Now you may be thinking that's a lot of car time for a cat. Would she be okay? Especially with a trip to Wal-Mart?

Sure, she was fine. Annoyed at being stuck in her carrier while I tried to find the tissues (I was lied to by an endcap and looked in the wrong aisle for like 5 minutes before I could find them), but fine.

The first beach we tried was Birch Point State Park, but apparently the state decided that, despite our Septembers being anywhere from 55-75℉/12,8-23,9℃, and Mainers swimming in the ocean up until about January, the beach had to be closed. What a pain.

Well, we weren't going to let a little State Park Closure prevent our girl from having her first ever beach adventure, so we headed over to another beach - Crescent Beach. Poor Evie the Cat was chirping crankily from her carrier and reaching out with her cute little paws by now, so we made our way down and parked. By the time we got her out on her leash (which she was very curious and very nervous about), I realized we'd made a fatal error that my fellow Mainers will probably tease me for.

We forgot to check the tides.

We arrived just as the tide was at its highest, just starting to ebb.

On a beach where the beach head is 100% loose stones.

Yeah, there was no sand for her to walk on for the first half of our visit.

She enjoyed sniffing the dried seaweed and climbing the rocks (which, yeah, was against the rules, but she's a cat, so she can't read signs), and we figured that would be it.

And then another family pulled up and came hiking across the stones.

If you've never met my cat, you need to know this about her:

Evie LOVES people. She is obsessed. She desperately loves new people and wants to hang out with everyone on Earth.

So of course, she immediately had to go visit these people, dragging my mother and I with her. Thankfully the family thought our 3-Braincell Tabby was the bees' knees, and they put up with her crawling under their feet and begging for snacks (they had a banana). Eventually, the water receded enough for us to put her down on wet sand and...

She hated it.

So, Evie did not enjoy her beach trip as much as we'd hoped lol.

And she was also so squirmy and exploratory that it was very hard to take pictures between trying to dislodge her from crevices where she got herself stuck. I did manage two pictures, though!

Here's Evie sitting on a rock, about to go wrap her leash around a rugosa rose bush.
She's just noticed the family and wants to go say hi!

Here Evie has failed to retrieve banana from the other family
And has grumpily decided she'll go climb more rocks in protest.
Also seaweed smells fun to her I guess lol

After that, we scooped her up and took her home, where she sulked outside with my mom. I ran upstairs and worked on yesterday's blog.

I do have to admit, though...

It was incredibly hard, being surrounded by all those delightfully smooth beach rocks in so many interesting colors and shapes and knowing I couldn't keep any of them. It's illegal to take the beach rocks, and at Crescent Beach, they're absolutely necessary for preventing erosion, so it's just bad all around to take beach rocks from there. If I'd gone wading and grabbed one from the water, I'd have been pretty ok with it, but I wasn't going to get in the surf while the tide was receding as fast as it was (we went from no sand to 5 feet of sand in 10 minutes, it seemed).

So that was my adventure this week!

The rest of the week's plans are thus:

• If you want to send me a coffee donation through that light green button, you can leave a message telling me what theme I'm drawing from this week! Those themes are:
• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Geometric
  
• Location
• Dedbert
• Word
• Art Blog on Thursday
• I forgot to post the tea last week so maybe I'll do it this weekend? We'll see
• More crochet for Monday!
• Blather next Tuesday!

I hope my feline misadventures have brought a smile to your face today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which This Week's Theme Was: LOCATION

Today is another gorgeous day! Sunny and clear and breezy, and it's 72℉/22,2℃ with 52% humidity. It's just lovely! I spent most of today painting a lovely little image on my small, heavily-textured paper, and I couldn't be happier with how it looks.

This week's theme was "Location", which meant that I had to go about figuring out what I wanted to draw or paint. I usually work from references, but today I just started laying down random patches of blue to make a sky, then snagged my paint stick of Daniel Smith's Buff Titanium and laid down some land masses. From there, I built up my colors and shading, and the very last things I added were a light house and my signature!

Here is my work for the day:

"Landscape By The Sea"; watercolor on rag paper; 2022

I finally got the scanner working again! Seems like we just had to get new internet...

This painting was so much fun to make, and it came together so organically! I did zero sketching, and instead I layered paints from my Emooqi black metal palette as well as my Daniel Smith Buff Titanium, and it just... grew into itself. I love it. It's even more wonderful in person! It's also now available on my long-forgotten Redbubble shop!

From today til Wednesday night at 9PM Eastern Time, I'll be taking requests for next week's art topic via Ko-Fi! Leave a tip with a message containing what you'd like to see: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Food, Location, or Geometric! For an Extra Coffee (another $3 USD), you can tell me whether you'd like to see it in Pencil, Colored Pencil, Pen, Marker, Watercolor, or Digital! I will do my best to fulfill any requests made this way, regardless of how many I get!

Hopefully you can see why I got so excited about today's piece. It was a blast to create, and I must recommend the "slap it down on your 5"x7" paper" technique I used, because it was fun and the end result was fantastic.

Now Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which Another Dream is Made

This week's theme was "Animal", so a huge shoutout and thank you to Z, who caffeinated today's painting into existence!

Last week, I painted some pretty diamonds that had some neat color mixing, so I decided I'd try something similar this week! Except I did that thing I do where I do Too Much all at once...

I have 7 different watercolor palettes now - my original tube paints that I de-tubed, my Emooqi palette in the black tin, my Peter Pauper Press plastic palette, my pink-tinned metallics (another gift from Z, who is too fantastic for words), my Japanese metallic/pearlescents, my brush pens, and my watercolor pencils.

So I made a list of said palettes, and I added an 8th Category - "Mix", where I'd mix colors from 2 or more palettes together.

And for each palette, there was the number of colors plus the "Mix" category for within said category.

Yeah... for someone who supposedly hates math I sure do a lot of it for art...

Anyway, I used a random number generator and picked my palettes and colors based off of that!

For an entire image.

Last time, I just had numbers 1-96 and picked from either the Peter Pauper Press (1-48) palette or the Emooqi one (49-96).

This time, I got a number between 1-8 and then from there, I determined what the combinations were.

It was... a lot of numbers. I filled a sheet of notebook paper with two columns of colors!

Speaking of Paper, I used a sheet of my larger watercolor paper cut down by 50% across the middle. I don't use this paper often because it's 1) big, 2) unwieldy, and 3) expensive, but I'm so glad I used it today - none of my other paper would've looked as nice, and frankly, even the nice Hot Pressed block I used last week would've been too small.

"Deep Jelly Dreams"; Watercolor on paper; 2022

Top Detail

Middle Detail

Bottom Detail

This is another Dream image, and I hope some day to make a collection of Dreamscapes like this. I just really like the colors and the flow.

And yes, that's a small pink hammerhead shark sneaking out of the darkness in the bottom right corner.

I hope this piece made you smile, today. I have to say, working on it was super fun - each color, every wash and layer, was a surprise and a joy! If you've got a bunch of art supplies and you're getting stagnant on them, then I strongly recommend making a randomization table and creating based off of that!

For now though, I'll be heading off to bed. It's been a long day! If you're interested in choosing next week's theme, head over to my Ko-Fi account and send me a coffee with a message saying "Animal" "Vegetable" "Mineral" "Geometric" or "Location", depending on which category you'd like to see next!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Show You Progress & Errors!

Alright, I've been following YouTuber Nianiani for a few weeks now and I've learned so much! That picture with the seashells I posted a while back? Based on one of her tutorials. Couldn't have done it without her.

So I decided to try more of her tutorials!

She's got these lovely fruit, flower, tree, and even bunny tutorials but I am very hot. Today reached 87℉ (30.56℃) and it was so humid that it felt over 100℉ (37.78℃). I wanted to go to the freakin beach, but I didn't wanna go outside.

So I decided to try two of her tutorials involving the ocean!

The first attempt was a seascape with trees and a beach and it was lovely! But I literally could not make my paints cooperate, and since she utilizes quite a bit of Buff Titanium (a well-covering off-white tone I do not own yet), alas, I had to abort.

Attempt the Second was simply an aerial view of a wave coming in to shore. A study on the interplay of blue and gold (not Ted Kord & Michael Carter). A... highly complex layering experiment.

That I botched.

Twice.

Now, fortunately, Watercolors are fairly forgiving, regardless of what you've heard. They are forgiving, but they are also hard to substitute, and if your painting calls for pans and you have pencils, you're going to have to become... creative. Especially if you have committed the cardinal sin of painting without swatching your tones first.

Which is what happened to the first two tries I made at this piece.

Which I'm also not finished with yet.

Because I'm not in the AC anymore and my bedroom is a toasty 85℉ (29.44℃) plus an uncomfortable level of humidity. I have no one to blame but myself for being too stubborn to sit downstairs at the couch, battling the cat and wearing headphones. Yes, I'd rather have my inner knees sweat than my ears.

I'm dumb like that lol.

So here they are - my attempts at watercolor!

Try #1 at the Wave; Watercolor; 2021

What went wrong here? Well, you may notice the visible sketch lines in the background, but the other problem is... the blue is too irregular and too small. You'll see why if you watch the vid or see picture #3 lol.

Try #2 at The Wave; Watercolor; 2021

So what's wrong with this? Uh... kinda same problem - blobs too tiny, background gradient not very good.

The Wave; Watercolor; 2021

As you may be able to tell, this is the version I'm going with. Is it perfect? No. But I love that gradient I've got going from the deep water to the shore. I love the soft sand gradient. I am satisfied with the third layer of paint accentuating the ripples of the water. I can work with this.

Bonus: This was actually my first try at the Seascape painting, but I was able to rework it! I'm very, very happy about that.

Now, I'm about 7 minutes into the tutorial, so that should tell you how long this took between all the failures, life stuff (food, coffee, cats), and just waiting forever for paint to dry. Seriously. At one point I had to just... walk away for an hour while one of the layers dried. It wasn't even that wet! It was just that humid.

I hope I can get this finished in the next week or so, so keep an eye out!!!

Also, since I just got an iPad, if you're reading this and know how to do art on one, please let me know the best free app you can think of for painting on iPad!

That'll do it for me, tonight (wow it got late...)

Go Enjoy Something!!!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Drew An Otter!

This week has been filled with sea life. I've been watching a few livestreams of sea creatures from manatees to seals, but the one I always come back to is Joey the Otter!

Fluffy, cute, and hilarious, this little guy is fantastic for stress relief. He just... wiggles. And squeals. And sometimes he poops. And he eats clams.

Such a cutie.

Anyway, my partner and I love to watch the lil guy wiggle around and swim in his turtle pool. So I was asked to make a piece of art that commemorates the lil fella!

"Dreamy Drift" Digital, 2020

I'll be uploading this fellow to my Redbubble, so if you like the design, head on over!

Alright, that'll be about it for me :) I think I'll work on some more art tonight, do some writing, maybe have a third cup of mocha... it's a pretty artsy day for me.

Take care of yourselves out there, folks!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC