Summer is Dandy!

The dandelions are out in full force! Have an enjoyable weekend!

 

First Try

The weather has been absolutely perfect here and is starting to feel like summer.  I doodled this guy yesterday and decided to try and color it it Photoshop.  This is pretty much my first attempt at trying to take one of my sketches and color it in Photoshop.  I had tried awhile ago to do one but it was so far out there for me and didn't make any sense that it looked pretty much like garbage.  This one is a little better, but the big thing is that I understood more of what I was doing.  I still have a long way to go, but  I'm making progress!  Actually, only the guy was done in Photoshop and all the rest was done in Illustrator and then brought over to Photoshop:)

This week

This week I've been busy getting ready for the Holiday Faire at Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School here in town.  It is a really beautiful event.  Friday night is adults only and then Saturday is for the entire family. They actually have chestnuts roasting on an open fire outside the school!  The school is decorated very festive and cheerful, they have live music, an organic lunch, kids crafts and activities, along with wonderful holiday shopping from local vendors. Usually I'm just an attendee, but this year I thought I would be a vendor, hopefully I will have some time to do a little Christmas shopping.

 

Back in July when it was about 98 degrees, I was working on some Christmas paintings.  Fischer was wondering why in the world I was working on Christmas paintings in the middle of summer.  I told him that it made me feel cooler!  Here is one of my favorite pieces that I did.  It is similar to my painting called "Our Town",  this one is titled "Winter in Our Town"  

available here

This piece makes me dream about a warm and cozy fire after a wonderful day of snowboarding or skiing or any kind of winter fun.  

Forgotten

I've been busy updating my Etsy shop,  rewriting titles, changing tags and decreasing shipping costs all in hopes of bringing in more traffic to my shop.  I just can't seem to figure out Etsy.  My shop has been open for 2 years and I've had 10 sales.  Pretty sad isn't it?  Anyway, today I found an image that I thought was listed and wasn't.

I painted this one back in July or August.  It was one of the few paintings I did this summer.  Inspiration definitely went on summer vacation, somewhere far, far away I think.  (luckily she did return this fall feeling refreshed)

                                                                        "In the Thistle"  available here

 So while I didn't paint much this summer, and choosing not to fight with inspiration not being here, I chose instead to focus on getting back in shape and socializing.    I finally started going to our local bike shops (Blue Dog Cycle) women's ride, which got me totally hooked on mountain biking and loving it.  Every Wednesday we would bike and then go to the wine bar afterwards.  How awesome is that?  Besides biking I've finally gotten into a wonderful running groove.  I've always ran, but its been so hard to have any kind of exercise routine since having kids, but now that they are getting older its becoming a little bit easier.  (it still takes some will power though, like getting up at 5am today and heading out into the very cold darkness to get my run in before the kiddos get up for school)  So while it bothered me once and awhile that I had zero inspiration this summer, there was plenty of other fun things to do this summer to keep me occupied, cookouts, picnics, bonfires, late summer nights with the kids and neighbors.    For the most part I just accepted that I wasn't inspired  and knew it was for a reason and it would of course return and it did.

Have a wonderful weekend, I hope you find something fun or inspirational to do.   I've been busy sewing a little birthday present for Amelia and have also started some holiday crafting that I'll share next week.

Dancing in the Rain!

underwater

Summer time is:

homemade strawberry ice cream!

What's that noise?

 

I have to admit, this isn't one of my prettiest paintings!  I've come to love these noisy little guys that emerge from the ground to fill my late summer days with all sorts of buzzing sounds.  As long as I can remember, I've always associated summer in Wisconsin with the buzz of the cicadas.  When I was a kid, I found the noise to be a little irritating, but now I've come to really appreciate it and look forward to it every year.  I always thought the cicadas made noise all through the summer, but upon moving back to Wisconsin a few years back, I realized that they don't start to emerge until late summer.   I think the cicadas that I'm used to are the annual or dog day cicadas, given this name because they emerge in late July and August.  Did you know that the cicada is the noisiest insect in the world and only the male makes the sounds?  I really look forward to hearing my first cicada in the summer.  This year Amelia and I heard it at the same time, it was the last week of July, and Amelia looks up at me very excitedly and says "cada mama, cada mama".  I love that she was so excited about it and that she actually remembered it from last year!  Along with crickets, cicadas are one of my favorite sounds of summer. 

Croquet anyone?

I love croquet!  Growing up, it was one of my favorite summer past times, that and jarts, not the rounded ones they have now, but the pointy metal ones that they no longer make.  (no one in our family was ever injured by them, but we do have a dent in the house from a crazy thrower and I remember a friend throwing it through our tent!)  I'm lucky enough to have an old set that I got a few years back for my birthday from some friends, they had bought them at a yard sale  years ago, but didn't use them and my husband expressed how much I really wanted them and what they meant to me and now I'm as happy as can be with my own set of jarts!

It seems that hardly a day went by where we didn't play at least one game of croquet.  The neighbor kids would usually join us.  My mom was always the one to beat! It's fun to think back to those summer days of being a kid.  I remember red being my favorite color to be.  I think mostly because if you were red you got to go first.  My mom usually preferred yellow.  I went through phases though, where I remember wanting to be only black,  and then for awhile orange, but never the green.  It was a darker green and no one ever seemed to want to be that color.  If it would have been a lime green, it definitely would have been my favorite.

Last year we got a really old croquet set from my sister-in-law.  It looks like it was well used and is missing some of the hoops, but is still in good working condition.

I'm really looking forward to playing all these summer games with the kids as they are getting older.  I think we'll wait to play the jarts with them until they are  a bit older?  Instead we've been playing badminton, which is another favorite of mine.  A friend invited us to play bocce ball recently and that's a game that I've only played once or twice and haven't gotten into, but maybe.



I was watching the kids play around with the croquet set the other day and that was the inspiration for this painting.  I wasn't sure what color ball/mallet I was going to go with and when the piece was finished I realized that I had went with red.  I don't even remember thinking about.  I guess red is still my favorite!