Creatures From The Trip

We are now in the process of traveling back to Florida. I thought it would be nice to share with you some of the animals we have seen on our trip. The first one is this lovely white-tailed deer who ran across the road in front of our car somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Not to worry, it was a long ways from us, but such a lovely creature!





It was a very interesting day for critters, as not much later we found bison crossing under the highway (through an underpass) and were able to get some great shots of them both before they disappeared into the tunnel and after they reappeared on the other side of the road. Buffalo aren't especially rare, but we hardly ever see them, and it's fun to imagine what the plains must have looked like when there were thousands of them roaming free.
Then we went on to Mount Rushmore and saw these stone critters. What an amazing feat of human artistry this mountainside is! Seeing pictures of it is not adequate to describe the size of this work of art, because it really is unimaginable that someone sought out to create these images out of a mountainside. I have never noticed the glasses on Teddy Roosevelt until that day.

While we were at Mount Rushmore, we saw these mountain goats. At first they were drinking from a puddle in the parking lot, but that isn't a very cool place for them to be. They were obviously accustomed to people and showed no fear of us, but a dog barked, and they took off. This photo of them in a more natural environment is my favorite.Hope you enjoyed the critters, because I've had a lot of fun taking their pictures. It's what I do when we're on the road and there's no time to paint.

Beautiful Fall Colors To Share

We have been admiring the beautiful fall colors in the mountains of Colorado and taking lots of pictures. it was a crisp, fall day when I took the photo that inspired this little watercolor. I loved the contrast between the pale blue-green of the sage in the foreground with the gold of the Aspen trees in the background and the dark green and gold-greens of the tall evergreen in the mid-area. The far-away trees on the mountains lose their dark color because of the atmosphere and the distance.

Here are some additional photos we took that day. You can see just how incredibly beautiful, that Autumn's gold dress looks on the hillsides.





I have put Colorado Gold up in my Etsy shop, DreamON. Click here for more information.

The Italian Wash Job - ORIGINAL Mixed Media Watercolor and Acrylic on paper

It's finally done!

I started talking about this painting on July 12th as a sort of demo and did another feature on it on August 7th. Then I got busy preparing paintings for art shows, and did not get back to working on it again until this week. Final touches included straightening the lines of the shadows with acrylics and painting shadows under the laundry with a watercolor mixture of Cobalt Blue, Winsor Violet and Burnt Sienna.

I wasn't sure until the shadows went in that I was going to even like it, but they made a tremendous difference. One thing that has befuddled me for quite awhile is where the focal point is. I like the pane on the left the best, but the pane on the right is bigger and closer. Theoretically it should be where the center of interest is found; so I put some red socks there and increased the contrast of light and dark in this pane, but I still am more interested in the left pane, and I think it still dominates. I look at the lower window in the left pane, and I'm not sure that is a bad thing. After all it is located in the Golden Triangle. Where do you think the focal point is located?

More information about this painting is located here: