Paintings 16 & 17

With a vacation and some freelance design projects lately, I've been falling a little behind with my painting schedule this month, so I rocked out two paintings yesterday. They both gave me a workout on laying down watercolor washes!


This scenic is from my imagination, but based on Glacier National Park and a trillium I've used in a previous painting. There are parts of the park where the trees are so thick that it is very dark in the understory, but wherever there's a break in the trees above your head, you can see the mountains towering over everything. Oftentimes the mountains are much closer than I show in this painting. They are omnipresent. Glacier is one of my very favorite places anywhere in the world (especially in the off-season when you basically have the park to yourself!).

The feather study was based on a specimen I had stowed in a box of bits and pieces of nature that I keep on hand for inspiration. The fuzzy bits (called the afterfeather apparently) were tricky to create with shadows on a colored background. I wish I could've gotten the feather a bit crisper, but I was doing a fair amount of pulling off color, since I didn't use any masking this time. I don't know what bird the feather is from. I found it in our yard a few years ago. It is a fairly small feather, so I'm thinking maybe it is a chickadee feather. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know what it is!


I also totally cleaned out my studio area yesterday and reorganized everything. Now I have space to paint! It is amazing what a difference that makes. I put up two small decorative "floating" shelves and put some little things I find inspirational on them (including a photograph of Georgia O'Keefe!) to increase the calm and beauty quotient in the space I paint in. I just have to make a concerted effort to keep it this way now!