Mandeville Vine Studies

...and you thought I'd fallen off the edge of the earth!

Summer is a busy time in the garden - planting, weeding, fertilizing, weeding, transplanting, weeding and more weeding. Now fall is nearly here and I'll be prunning and cutting back dead flower stalks. Next comes raking up millions of oak leaves to use for mulch.

But in the meantime...

I have been doing some studies of my mandeville vine in preparation for a much larger piece. These are also experiments. You might notice that each leaf is different in color. Some are colored pencil on top of watercolor, come are just colored pencil and a few are lighter green colored pencil on top of watercolor shadows. The bloom is on top of a pale pink watercolor. I have found that the pinks in the Prismacolor lines are kinda' lacking. The background is colored pencil on top of pale blue watercolor. I used an artstix blender and instead of blending the background, it pushed the colored pencil around in such a way that I ended up with a speckled looking background. Not quite what I had in mind.

This one just didn't turn out anything like I wanted. It has the look of a tropical shirt print. The background was darker until I went over it with a white artstix. It made it too light and it's not an even tint any more. The biggest problem is that the background and the flower are nearly the same value in color. So the flower doesn't stand out from the background as much as the piece show above.

These are small pieces, about 6 inches by 6 inches, on Magnani Aquerello hot press paper.

Back to the studio for more experiments.

Update

I have sold my work titled "Topsail Treasures". You can see it in the blog post here.
It was bought by another artist, which just floors me. I guess I'm my own worst critic. But it makes me feel validated, that as an artist, I am doing some good works.

This is one of a few studies that I'm doing in preparation for a larger piece. This is a Mandevilla vine that I have had growing for several years.

I have been able to keep it going through the winters by prunning it back rather severly and cutting back on watering. I move it inside to protect it from freezing temperatures. It makes it through the winter and once outside in the sunshine and warm spring air, grows like a weed.

Another Brush Footed Butterfly

This is a another brush footed butterfly that showed up earlier this month. It was all browns and grays and when it lit on a branch, it was very well camouflaged.

It has black and white antenna like the earlier brush footed butterfly I found in my backyard. I haven't been able to identify what kind of butterfly this particular insect is. However, I'm pretty sure it is a butterfly, rather than a moth.

It's been quite an experience going on safari in my own backyard. I've taken hundreds of photos of butterflies, dragonflies, flowers, beetles, leaves and spiders.

Man on the Moon!

Where were you when man walked on the moon?

A lot of you were not even born yet. But I was a youngster, allowed to stay up way past my bedtime and watch that historic moment. I still remember how absolutely awestruck I was. My school class has watched every Apollo launch.

Now that I'm an engineer, I have so much respect for the astronauts, the ground crews, the control crew and the thousands or engineers who came up with new materials, new methods, new ways of manufacturing, and new computational methods. Now, 40 years later, we still are reaping the benefits of the Apollo program.

I firmly believe, that we as a nation, need to head down this path again. The new industries and scientific discoveries from the space program are just what we need to push us out of this recession and put us in a position to have jobs again and be in the scientific forefront. Wouldn't part of the money spent on the war in Iraq have been put to so much better use in NASA research?

More Backyard Sketches

We had a good rain yesterday. Today I have huge Fireball hibiscus blooms. They are about 8 - 10 inches across and spectacularly red. These are cold-hardy plants and will die back to the ground after the first frost. They sprout up in late May, normally after everything else has come up. There are many varieties of these cold-hardy hibiscus now. These particular plants were ordered from Wayside Gardens and are growing in very large deck planters. But I need to divide them up and relocate a few this fall.

Did you know that hibiscus are in the same family as okra. If you look at an okra bloom, you will see the resemblance.

This sketch was done in the early afternoon in graphite and colored pencil. I was sitting outside working on this and I noticed that my colored pencil were really creamy - much more than normal. I was under an umbrella working, but the heat of the day softened my pencils.

While I was sitting there, a hummingbird came to visit twice and let me know that he'd like the deck feeder refilled as well. Too bad I didn't have my camera with me. Hummer photos are so hard to take.

Practice, practice, practice

I'm not traveling for any art workshops this summer. So I'm doing the next best thing. I'm working through Arlene Steinberg's Masterful Color: Vibrant Colored Pencil Paintings Layer by Layer.

These are the first three exercises/demos in the book. The iris is my current lesson and it's in the first stage of underpainting. I'm using Prismacolors and a Canson Biggie sketch paper - so nothing fancy here!

Working this way has advantages. No airfare, car rental, hotels, etc. I can stop and start at will. (But I'm trying to put in several hours a day on this.) I can do the same lesson a hundred times if that's what I need to understand the process. I'm in my own little studio with Mickey the cat offering criticism when needed. Being an artist is a solo type of profession. You have to be your own boss and set a schedule you can stick to. It would be nice to have a teacher occasionally, but times being what they are, this is good too.

I really like Arlene's work. She and Gemma Gylling own and run the scribbletalk.com forum for colored pencil artists. It's a great resource.