why I switched

As long as I’m playing with paints, I thought I’d do a comparison of greens mixing the warm yellow in my current palette with cerulean blue chromium, ultramarine, and indigo. For years I used Daniel Smith’s quinacridone gold for my warm yellow. But the new version just wasn’t mixing the same as the original pigment that’s no longer made.

So this past year, I switched to using nickel azo yellow instead. Much brighter, cleaner greens!

The lower scrap of watercolor paper shows mixes with the original quin. gold; the upper scrap shows mixes made with the new version of quin. gold and those made with nickel azo yellow.

I can always neutralize a bright green by adding a bit of red pigment but I can’t make a duller, earthier green bright again.

just playing

Yesterday, the big event was to take Butters, Bardie, and Scottie to the vet for nail trims. 

The rest of the day, I just played.

a gouache rose

Gouache looks so bright when painted on Kraft paper, though it is really too lightweight for wet media. I grabbed this small sketchbook from Traveler’s Company off the shelf just to give my new gouache palette a try. Because paint ripples the paper a bit, I plan on sketching on one side only and use the other for text. (That rippled bit on the left side is a sketch of my palette on the previous page). The paper will be great for black & white ink sketches.

Sunday was our 52nd wedding anniversary and Bill gave me a dozen of the deepest, darkest red roses! So I chose one of them for this quick sketch.

I haven’t decided whether to remove the plastic cover from the sketchbook (I know, it’s technically a notebook — but I sketch more than note-taking). It might get in the way of drawing, but it does provide handy pockets to tuck receipts, etc. into.

playing with gouache

It has been years since I have played with the gouache paints in my stash. I love the look of vintage National Park posters, which look as though they may have been done in gouache. And some of my favorite paintings are the small gouache studies by Thomas Paquette. 

Recently reading that unused gouache can dry up in the tube, I decided to pull out the tubes in my stash and fill my oldest (original design, heavier metal) Pocket Palette. I stirred a tiny toothpick-tip amount of glycerin into each pan to minimize cracking and dried paint falling out of the pans. These paints are from M. Graham and Schminke, chosen for how easily they re-wet.

Then I tested this palette in my sketchbook, painting each color full-strength, watered down, and mixed with white. I can already see that these colors could be cut down to nine, allowing space for a mixing pan. Also, as lovely as the Helio Turquoise is, it’s a phthalo blue pigment and I just don’t care for phthalos. Yesterday I bought a tube of Winsor & Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise Light, one of my favorite colors in watercolor — I think that will replace the Helio Turquoise.

While I was playing, I also put together a Demi Palette to add to my small purse for away-from-home sketches in a tiny sketchbook. And made a color chart to test its colors out.

Bill’s dilemma

When our granddaughter Mikala graduated high school, Bill built her a beautiful “hope chest” (are they even called that anymore?). He never likes to make the same thing twice so when our other granddaughter Jayna graduated this year, he built her this humpback trunk.

Our oldest grandson, Quen, graduates next year. Whatever is he going to build him? Quen would probably say a guitar but that is beyond Bill’s expertise.

a pasture visitor

With the recent abundance of wind and rain, we had a large snapping turtle visit our south pasture. Not sure how he got through the fence but he later managed to find his way out again.

I learned a new word for the heavy wind storm we experienced on Thursday: a derecho. We often had similar storms when living in Kansas; I just didn’t know they had a special name. Powerful, sustained winds!

The storm knocked out power in the area — ours wasn’t restored until late on Saturday. Unfortunately, no electricity meant no water pumped from our well. A neighbor on rural water helped us out and we used pool water for the livestock. I was sure thankful to finally be able to take a shower!

I reconfigured my folio palette to place the mixing pans in a more centralized location. It seems to work better this way. I love how the palettes from Art Toolkit incorporate magnets so pans can be moved around or exchanged so easily!

I’m out-a-here!

some cacti

These are some of the cacti growing in front of our barn home among some large rocks. It’s funny how sometimes the greens are yellowish and sometimes a cool blueish green. The Peruvian apple cactus is actually much smaller than it appears on the sketchbook page, as it is very young. But it will eventually tower over everything, including us!

Jayna . . . and Maxwell

Today our granddaughter Jayna graduates from high school and I painted this card for her. When she was a baby, I adopted a wheaten Scottish terrier named Maxwell from a Scottie rescue group in Missouri.

When their mom returned to work after Jayna’s brother Josiah was born, Maxwell went with me as I served as “granny nanny” for a few weeks. Jayna, who had always shared a special bond with him, asked me “Grandma, when you go home can Maxwell stay and be my dog?”

I had been warned she might ask. And Maxwell had a special need for children in his life, having been rescued from a puppy mill where children had been the only human contact he had experienced. So I said yes.

Maxwell is now gone and Jayna will soon be heading off to attend college. But he is still a big part of her heart so I drew him on the card.

Jayna with her mom, Carrie

for Mom

When I painted a birthday card for my brother a few weeks ago, I also painted this card to send to my mom. I saw something similar when shopping online and I loved the use of metallic lines over the leaves, but it was a birthday card. So I made one myself but changed the greeting for Mother’s Day.

It’s getting harder and harder to find good cards to send to those we love. Either they are cheap and boring, or so-called “humor” of an offensive nature. I keep a box of Strathmore watercolor card blanks on the shelf — maybe I’ll be painting my own more often.

I love you, Mom❣️

waiting to be toasted

The weird low-fiber diet I’ve been on for three months is lacking so many good things, but at least I can enjoy cinnamon toast! I keep the bread in the freezer, breaking off a couple of slices to toast whenever I want some.

I combined my limited palette based on 19th century watercolors and what I call my “Texas gulf coast, prairies, and piney woods palette” in the same Folio palette, separated by plenty of mixing spaces.

🎉🎊🥳 After sketching this I had a virtual follow-up visit with my doctor — he took me off the silly fiber-free diet and now I am free to eat anything! Woo-hoo! Bring on the fruits and veggies! 🥕🥬🫛🥒🍅

(Drawn in continuous contour line with a Kaweco Supra fountain pen.)

a soggy mushroom . . . and post-cancer thoughts

We have been having several weeks of rainy weather off-and-on. Early one morning as Butters and I walked the front pasture I came across this lovely brownish pink mushroom with a very frilly edge. But as I touched it, the edge bits began to crumble off due to too much absorbed moisture.

This past week has been extremely challenging for me as I continue my post-cancer healing. On Monday I had the final surgery to reverse the ostomy. The cancer is completely gone, the ostomy bag is history — I naively thought this would be the end of it! But after 14 months of being “off line”, my colon and sphincter muscles have to relearn how to work. This has proven to be a frustrating and often painful process. (How very often I wish that I could go back in time and have that timely colonoscopy that would’ve detected cancer early enough to have avoided all this!)

Each day at times feels week-long as I struggle through this process. But then a comment on a previous blog post or on my Instagram account captures my attention and reminds me of just how far I have come. As a very dear friend just reminded me, “God brought you through we know He works according to His time. I  can imagine Him saying. "I'm not done with you yet my child. A few more months is necessary for me to accomplish my will for you."

I’m still here . . .

This coming Tuesday is my brother’s birthday. With everything that’s been going lately, I lacked inspiration for sketching his card this year — until I happened to see another sketcher’s Instagram post of a silo with his friend’s initials, age, and birth year on it. (I regret not remembering that artist’s name so I could give him credit.) 

I had snapped a photo of a grain silo in the Kansas Flint Hills 1 1/2 years ago so I used that to paint a similar card for my brother, finishing it a couple of weeks ago.

On Monday I underwent the final surgery reversing the ostomy I’ve lived with for 14 months. A simple, short surgery this time but now a long time of healing follows as my body relearns how to function normally. No hospital sketches were done due to a IV once again placed in my right hand. Returning home the next day, I gave no thought to sketching at all. But today I think I will maybe get back to drawing something. Moving forward, with much thankfulness, is a good thing.