Spring Sabbatical

A little bird reminded me today that I've been absent from the Blogosphere for a while now. We've been busy apartment-hunting, packing up our lives, getting our apartment ready for house showings, and trying to get outside and catch Spring as much as possible. It's been a colder than usual Spring, but the first brave wildflowers are blooming and the birds are slowly coming back.

The hooded mergansers are pairing up.

The osprey are back.

And my jacob's-ladder is blooming.

We were starting to panic, but we finally found an apartment...and it is walking distance from three bakeries, a Dairy Queen, a cafe with gelato, and a locally-made ice cream stand. Life can't get much better than that! We'll be downsizing a little in the main living areas, but I will have space for my own art studio with natural northern light so I'm not complaining about the tighter quarters. When you've been married for 21 years, you've seen it all anyway. We'll be moved in by June.

If I have time, I do want to share some before and after shots of the place as it is a diamond in the rough. Its low ceilings and small rooms could make for either a depressing and cluttered claustrophobic space (as with the previous tenants), or a simple and cozy retreat (my goal). If you love interior design challenges as much as I do, you should check out Apartment Therapy I stumbled onto the site while looking for design inspiration for small spaces and they just happened to be having a "Cool Small Space" contest. And they have a fabulous sister site called Re Nest that focuses on green design and DIY projects with recycled materials.

Given my to-do list for the next two months, I may be absent from the Blogosphere more often than not. But stay tuned - when the dust finally settles in July, I should have some exciting art, stories, and photos to share!

Plant Shopping Spree

Not bad for the first year, eh?

I am a plant addict. Other women get off on buying shoes or handbags or the latest must-have piece; I get off on buying plants. This weekend I noticed that our neighborhood nursery was having a sale on native plants and my palms got sweaty and my heart began to race. Should I get kinnick-kinnick for an evergreen ground cover, or our local lonicera honeysuckle to bring in the hummers? I've been pining for some penstemon, but sticky geranium would add some nice spring color. Decisions, decisions!

When I got to the nursery, I realized I had completely forgotten about native grasses. How I love grasses, particularly in fall when they change colors from greens to golds, tans and reds, and in winter when they add a little something to the bleak landscape. So first into my cart went a little bluestem - a lovely clumper with hints of red and not too big for my little garden.

Little bluestem Schizachyrium scoparium meeting its new friends in the garden.

Then, just as I was about to put a sticky geranium in my cart, I realized that it had pink blooms! Gorgeous blooms, but pink, none the less. I really need some spring color other than pink. Jacob's ladder has sky blue flowers in spring, which would be a nice change, and this fantastic fern-like foliage to add interest (as the gardening magazines say). So into the cart it went. Little bluestem - meet Jacob's-ladder. Jacob's-ladder - this is little bluestem.

Jacob's-ladder - Polemonium pulcherrium

I was just about at the end of my budget, but I had to get one more plant (I'm an artist - things look better in threes). I hadn't gotten anything to attract hummingbirds yet, and I still wanted more color variety in the spring. So I opted for a penstemon with showy bluish pink flowers.

Large beardtongue - Penstemon grandiflorus

I rushed home with my precious plants, awash with the flush of success. I couldn't wait to get my loot into the ground. However, the weather had other ideas - dark storm clouds were building over the mountains to the south and the wind was starting to pick up. So I left the new editions in their pots and retreated inside.

I was able to transplant my purchases into the garden this morning, and take a few pictures of the other treasures I have there. And they are treasures. In a few weeks the fall rains may start, and then our first frost and then that will be that for the garden until next year. Six months of winter is long time for a plant addict!

Liatris blooms up close and personal

A grasshopper retreats into the leaves of Autumn Joy sedum.

Paintings 2 and 3

Yesterday evening was so beautiful that I couldn't resist a walk along the river (and an ice cream stop) with Paul, so I am posting yesterday's and today's paintings together.

When we got home from our walk, I spotted Madeleine up in the window, totally focused on a couple of starlings in a neighbor's yard. Her concentration and the fading light appealed to me, hence Painting #2.

When I began Painting #2, I could immediately feel myself starting to rush again, so I took a couple of deep breathes and slowed down. I used a big brush on this one, looking for form not details.

It is so hard to do these paintings and not judge!

Today I painted this trillium (Western trillium Trillium ovatum), which is the subject I had originally planned to paint last night. I did a preliminary sketch during my lunch break yesterday and then transferred the sketch to watercolor paper this evening.


I again wanted to keep the brush strokes loose, but with a little more detail than yesterday's painting. Typically I work on hot press watercolor paper for that smooth surface that is so good for fine details, but I used cold press for these last two paintings since I have been working in a looser style this time.

97 more paintings to go!

The Impatient Artist

I've been working on a pen & ink drawing of a bunch of pasque flowers for about a week now. I manage to put down a few more dots each day during my lunch breaks and such. This weekend I got impatient with the process and wanted to see what it looked like with some color added. So that I didn't ruin another good drawing (See - I am learning), I scanned the not-completed pen & ink drawing and printed it out on a piece of bristol paper and then added watercolor to the printed piece.

Overall I'm pleased with it so far, but I discovered two important things through this process:
1). my new printer ink is not as waterproof as my old brand was and
2). I may have gone a little too heavy with the pen & ink in some areas. I think that I should have been a little more judicious with the ink shadowing and allowed the final watercolor step to imply shadows, too.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the background (oh, those dreaded backgrounds!) - pale green wash to imply other plants? Pale blue wash to imply sky?

In this case, I think my impatience paid off by satisfying that instant gratification side of me that had to know if this would be worth all the effort in the end. Now I can go back and complete the drawing in ink, easing up on the rest of the shadowing, and then add the watercolor to the original with confidence.

One of Those Days

We had planned to go birding this morning anyway, but waking up at 4:30 am was not part of the original idea. We are both finding that this sort of early morning wakefulness is happening more and more frequently. Is it age or stress? But now that spring is here, waking up so early does have its advantages when it happens on a day that you aren't due in to work; it gives you an excellent jump on the morning's birding. So we gathered up our spotting scope and binocs and other accoutrements of birding and headed out to a nearby wildlife refuge.

On the way, we passed through a town that had a bank with one of those helpful temperature reader boards and it said 29F. Er, I think we'll have breakfast first and let the sun get a little higher in the sky over a hot cup of coffee...

Once we had had more than our legal limit of biscuits and gravy, we managed to waddle back out to the car and continue on to the refuge. Even before we reached the refuge boundary, we were seeing good things, like this snipe hanging out on a convenient fence.

I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of our birding trip, but it was one of the best birding days we've had in a long time; not for sheer numbers of different species, but by the quality of the spotting. We discovered a great blue heron rookery after tracking a group of 5 great blue herons all wheeling over a patch of trees. We spied some greater yellowlegs that were stopped off at one of the ponds to rest and refuel during their migration north. The ponds also had a profusion of cinnamon teal - always a treat - with pintail, bufflehead and shoveler thrown in for good measure.

And the tree swallows were back in force. Check out this part of a walking path, just covered in tree swallows. We'd never seen anything like it:There were just a few bird boxes scattered in the area and each one was being guarded by a pair of tree swallows. All the other swallows were circling these boxes, making lots of noise. It appeared that they were all trying to drive the swallow pairs away. I'd say this was a swallow housing crisis! I managed to snap this shot of an aerial bombardment in progress. If you look closely, you'll see that both of their beaks are open as they squawk at each other in frustration (oops, am I anthropomorphising?)

Some osprey had taken up residence on a nesting platform nearby, but there didn't seem to be any disputes going on between them.

Later in the day I snapped this picture looking up a hillside of arrow-leaved balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) in bloom. There are rain and snow showers in the forecast again, so I figured this might be the only good chance I'd get for some reference shots of the blooms. As I was taking these photos, I could hear two spotted towhees calling nearby. Ah, what a day!

The Wildflowers Keep Coming

Although we had snow showers earlier in the week (making everyone a little nervous), it warmed up nicely and gave us hope for the weekend.

On Thursday evening, a group of us hiked up to an area overlooking the city that has a wonderful little alpine habitat with lots of "pin cushion" plants including this dainty little douglasia (Douglasia montana in the primrose family) that happened to be blooming.

Then today I went on a geology field trip run by the Montana Natural History Center. They kindly arranged for perfect weather for us. The field trip was fabulous, making me appreciate what has gone into the making of our beautiful valley. And as an added bonus, we saw this season's first violet-green swallows, and more wildflowers like shooting stars (Dodecatheon pulchellum) and these pasqueflowers (or prairie crocus; Pulsatilla patens). Luckily the geology expert was very understanding when he was upstaged by things like this.

While the group was eating lunch, I snuck back to this clump of pasqueflowers and tried to get a couple of quick sketches in. There was a bit of a breeze, so whenever I looked away from the flower, it would move just enough to throw off my sketch. However I did get a bunch of really great reference photos and I can feel a drawing of these wildflowers brewing...

All the beautiful weather and the precipitation earlier in the week also means that the weeds are multiplying like rabbits on fertility drugs. So while I am on my knees, getting a crick in my neck pulling weeds out, I can be dreaming of the beautiful pasqueflower drawing I will do once every blasted weed is gone from the garden.

More Signs of Spring

This whole past week has been glorious, and every day brings changes as Spring finally takes hold. Of note: early wildflowers such as biscuit-root, buttercups and yellowbells are blooming, and the spotted towhees are back.

Daily walks along the river have been replacing my daily sketches this week, but I figure it is warranted to let my poor Vitamin D-starved skin soak up the sun.