a few mushrooms

With all this off-and-on rainy weather, there are always new varieties of mushrooms popping up everywhere. These are just a few of the latest ones.

We seem to have an abundance of tiny frogs as well. 🐸 🐸 🐸 

red rocket

Although our crepe myrtle tree has been blooming steadily all month, it hasn’t been as full of color as previous years. Our newly planted lantana shrubs are also suffering. This year has just been too wet! These plants thrive in hot, dry summers.

We had an old fashioned pink crepe myrtle in Kansas. But years ago while visiting Houston, I saw this deep red flowering variety planted along Eldridge Parkway — and knew I would one day plant one of my own.

(Oddly, one or two white flowers have popped up on the tree this year, hidden among the red.)

tweaking a Demi Palette

Trying out new combinations of colors is the main reason I love Pocket Palettes. With magnets holding the pans of paint, it is so easy to change my mind!

After putting together a new combo in this Demi Palette to go with the Shire Blue watercolor I just bought, I tried a quick landscape (Making imaginary scenes is hard for me; I just roughly painted something seen online). Then decided the warm yellow and phthalo blue were just wrong for me.

So those were switched out for two others — I know I can mix the browns but it’s so much easier to start mixes with transparent red oxide! I tried another landscape, this time in my tiny sketchbook (which I found out was not so good working wet-in-wet!). I think I like working with these colors.

an emerald green Folio pan

When Art Toolkit recently offered an emerald green Folio palette for Sketcher Fest Edmonds, I ordered one. No, I was not attending the event. No, I decidedly Did Not need another palette. But isn’t it a lovely shade of green? 🙄

The quote is from a favorite movie we re-watched recently, “The Magic of Belle Isle”. A funny quote, considering I only draw what I am looking at. Perhaps for me it refers to the undefinable “something” that makes an ordinary object something special.

My black Folio stays on my art table containing 15 large double pans of my most often used pigments. Inside a living room side table drawer is a Travel & Sketch Folio that holds paints especially chosen for Texas gulf coast, prairies, and piney woods — and space to hold colored pencil leads that fit in a clutch pencil.

This Folio holds a combination of watercolors plus a limited gouache palette. It will be in my art toolkit, ready to grab when we travel or go camping and I don’t know what I might use. Of course, that depends on our actually traveling or camping . . . something we don’t see at the moment but we are looking forward to.

The tiny Demi Palette in the sketch holds a limited set of watercolors I recently put together just to play, including Schmincke’s Shire Blue, a lovely granulating greenish, grayish blue. Today Bill and I saw a car of the same color — an intriguing shade that wasn’t really any of the three colors but all three at once.

endings and beginnings

I started these two landscape sketches last week, loosely drawing the ideas in pencil. A few days later, the borders were taped off and initial washes painted wet-in-wet and left to dry . . .

Eventually, I decided to finish them. The left side was from a photo I took the evening of the hurricane after it left our area, downgraded to a tropical storm. The right side is sunrise three days later as I walked my corgi.

Lilliputian mushrooms

I found the teeniest mushrooms while walking with my Corgi, Butters, in the front pasture! The youngest ones were no larger than my sewing pins.

A phone conversation with my mom made me wonder: what is the difference between a mushroom and a toadstool?

waiting for our orders

While our daughter Kristen and granddaughter Mikala went to clean her old apartment (she’s moving from a shared apartment into a single as she begins vet school), son-in-law Michael joined us for lunch at Goodson’s in Tomball. I drew these condiments, then added watercolor later at home.

The home-style food was delicious, as usual, but too much! I brought half of mine home for later. Plus we each brought home desserts “to go”.

Butters in blue ink

A simple ink sketch of Butters as she snuggled next to me. She does not like rain, so recent storms have been a bit nerve-wracking for her.

I drew this directly in ink using the blue ink cartridge that comes with Kaweco Liliput fountain pens and my Fire Blue Liliput, plus a bit of white Gelly Roll pen. The small kraft paper notebook is from Travelers Company.

a bit of lunch sketching

 

Anticipating the hurricane and subsequent loss of power, we did not have a lot of food in the refrigerator. So, rather than buying groceries, we chose to eat out.

I was able to draw this image from a vintage sign on the wall before our meal arrived — then finished* it at home.

*painted using a summer triad of hansa yellow, quin. magenta, and phthalo blue.

a hurricane of a day

Today has been a do-nothing kind of day. Hurricane Beryl made landfall about 4:00 am and headed in a curving NNW to NNE path towards us (the eye of the storm went right over us and slightly to the east). We lost power at 9:30 and have been without electricity (or well water) until just a few minutes ago.

A bit dark inside for sketching, a bit Windy and Wet for going outside. Got tired of reading so I picked up one of the leaf clusters that had blown onto the back patio and drew it.

It’s so good to have AC again! And running water!

pear butter

Bill has been busy picking pears from one of our baby trees, cooking them into yummy pear butter, then canning them. So I recorded it in my journal. Gotta help in some way, right?

This weekend, pears will be picked from the other tree and the process will be repeated. Only this time I think the plan is to just can the sliced pears.