The Journey

“Little by little, one travels far.” says JRR Tolkien. That was one of the inspirations for this new painting. This was Roland’s other birthday painting, and one I’m really proud of.

Since April, I’ve been joining him on his weekly hikes which are mostly taken in the Chattahoochee River National Park. Being in a beautiful setting like this area, the hikes have a very calming and healing effect on my anxiety, and are, of course, great exercise. We bring our 3 dogs, so it’s both an upper and lower body workout!

The painting is of one of the paths. At the bottom of those steps is a deck area where you can stop and look over the river. Admittedly, we’ve had so much rain this spring and summer, that the foliage is very lush, and blocks much of the view right now.

Everyone should have somewhere that restores their soul.

Looking Skyward

Dropping off today’s artistic accomplishment. More of a palate cleanser after the rose picture which took more than several days. This one just took an afternoon. Of course, it shows, but sometimes you just gotta paint. When I was in the backyard the other day, I took picture, looking up into the trees, and wondered if I could recreate it.

And I did semi-successfully. Perfecting painting techniques from mixing colors to figuring out the best brush to use takes some practice, so I’m chalking this one up to practice, and the odds are, I’ll just paint over it one of these day.

So here it will live on, in all its glory.

I hope your skies are sunny and blue.

My First Landscape

In the weekend class I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the second project we painted was a landscape. I had brought several personal photographs as possibilities that were taken either by me or my husband, Roland. We were using acrylic paints, and learned about adding pre-painted tissue paper for texture.

Acrylic paint, tissue paper, painted September 2012

Inspiration photo is of Point Lobos State Reserve in California.

Spark #2

In September, 2012, I took a weekend painting class at Spruill Center for the Arts in Atlanta. The class was called landscapes and collage (or something like that), and turned out to be different than what I was expecting, but having never really done any painting (except walls in my house), I was intrigued. Oh, yeah, I had also been doing some experimenting with watercolors in the 366 Pages journal mentioned yesterday. This class was primarily acrylics, though not this introductory piece. This piece was the first thing the instructor had us do. Let’s call it the Paper Tree Forest.

Construction paper, colored chalk