Friday Faces

  Hi everyone. Happy Friday to you. Today I'll be joining  Nicole for Friday Face Off  and Gillena for Friday Lunch Break.

  Nicole has made today faces showing emotion day. I'll admit I haven't done a lot of art lately (the gardens and then my reading has been calling me), but one thing I try to keep up with is my daily journal and my quick sketch drawings. These should count because I am making them myself. Anyhow, I went back and took a few snapshots of some of the faces with emotion. Some of these aren't bad, and some are a bit cartoon-ish, but as I’ve  mentioned before, I don't spend tons of time on any of my journal drawings.   I've included faces I've drawn both recently and back in the last year or so.

    Have a great rest of your Friday and start to your weekend!

A Few Photos from My Weekend Away

   Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you.

  You may have read how last weekend my husband and I took a quick little get-away.  My travel intro post is here if you're interested in a trip overview.  Basically, we caught a plane Friday morning and flew to Charleston, South Carolina. The timing worked out perfectly because it was only a 2 hour flight, so we had Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and all day Sunday to explore. We caught an early morning flight home Monday. 

  If you read my intro post, you might remember me mentioning that I have visited Charleston once before. That was 3 years ago when I went with a friend. This time my husband and I did some things I hadn't done before, except for one.

    The only place I wanted to revisit was Magnolia Plantation. They have a large very wild style garden with paths that twist around ponds and through shady southern woodlands. When I visited with my friend, it was early May and I had just missed the azalea blooms. This time I hoped to see them because I remembered there were so many azalea bushes in this wild style garden. 

   When we arrived we went from an April New Hampshire heat wave (about 70 degrees F/ 21 degrees C) to a real heatwave (95 degrees F/35 degrees C).  This had been going on for a while also, so the azaleas had bloomed a bit early. 😞 There were only a few blooms left.

   Most of the bushes looked like the one in the next photo.

  Oh well, we still had a nice walk around the gardens. You can never go wrong with a walk around a beautiful garden. ❤

  Plus, there was some wildlife in the gardens too.

   In fact, we saw several alligators. All the ones we saw were quite small compared to the ones I saw when I visited with my friend.  If there were still big ones there, perhaps they were trying to stay cool in the afternoon heat.

    We also saw this juvenile white ibis eating in one of the ponds. 

    There is something quite interesting about the trunk bases of cypress trees. 

   The water in some of these little ponds was covered in small weeds. With the heat and humidity, this walk felt almost jungle-like. It certainly felt like I was in the South and not in New Hampshire anymore.

   I have another post of photos from my visit to Magnolia. The next post will be a little of an area a little more cultivated. I'll share more soon. 

   

Roots

      Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. And Happy Earth Day too. 🌏

     If you stop by Elizabeth's blog, Altered Book Lover, be sure to wish her a happy birthday. 🎂 Happy birthday my friend. 

    Today I am sharing a page I made for Gillena's Tree Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge.  This challenge is perfect for Earth Day, isn't it? 🌎

     It was really difficult to get today's page to photograph correctly so you could see the details. For one thing, my journal at this point did not want to lie flat. 😒

   If you can't tell what this page is about, the quote gives it all away. The background is made with ink pads, acrylic paints, liquid ink, water color paints and even a bit of watercolor pencil. Who knew making soil was so complicated? Ha ha. I even used markers and drew in the little tunnel that some little unidentifiable animal is hiding in. 

    OK I should have taken a photo of both of the actual roots before I cut them out, but in the below photo you can see one of the roots.

   This page was an experimental background page I had made with paints, and then I used some liquid acrylic and dropped it down the page. I did this months ago, and funny how it moved itself out of a paper pile so I would see it now. Of course it didn't move itself, but suddenly it was on top of a pile of backgrounds and immediately I thought the brown drips looked like roots.

   I fussy cut these and then glued them down in my journal and worked on creating the background soil around them. I'm not sure the page needed the base of the tree  trunk and the little bit of ground and sky that I added at the very top. Here's an earlier version of the page before I finished making the soil have the right color and depth. I cropped this one to get rid of the top. You can definitely see the roots better here.

   I actually found the quote  in my plant stamp bin, and so maybe that is where I got the idea for roots. It's a great quote. The stamp is from Unity Rubber Stamps.

   I tried stamping the quote  directly with black ink on the page, but it didn't really show up. To fix that I stamped it on some acetate and fussy it cut it. This acetate had a frosted look  to it,  which is why it looks so white on the page. 

   On my trip last weekend we visited Congaree National Park in South Carolina. I'll share more about our interesting walk and the park in another post, but I did see a few cool roots that fit with today's art journal.

   I'm not sure what's going on with these roots on the right... and even with the tree on the left.

   but it looks like it's growing over the other trees exposed roots.

   The walk also took us through a few stands of cypress trees. Those little nubs you see are called cypress knees. They grow off the roots and help stabilize the tree and, when this ground is flooded with water (which it was not when we were there) they might also help get oxygen to the roots.

   More to come about this weekend-get-away once I get a bit more organized. 

   That's all for me right now. Have a super rest of your day. 

T Stands for I'm Back Home

     Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to everyone who stops by for T at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.

     This past weekend my husband and I took off on an adventure. Originally we had scheduled my daughter to dog and house sit for a week. We had to book her in back in December because she has to do some traveling around Massachusetts for her job, and some parts of Massachusetts are just too far for her to travel to and get back to our house without leaving the dogs for way too many hours. The reason we had to schedule so early is she needed to be able to leave her calendar clear.

  However, due to several different reasons, we decided to just head out for a long weekend instead of a week. A weekend isn't a whole lot of time, so after deciding we didn't want to go on a semi-local road trip, we concluded that wherever we went we wanted a short and direct flight. We also decided we were not going to fly out of Logan International Airport in Boston because that's a whole other level of time consumption. We have a couple budget airlines that only fly 2 days a week in other local airports, so we decided to try out Breeze from Manchester (NH) and fly to Charleston, South Carolina. (We liked flying Breeze. We’d fly them again!) They fly this route on Fridays and Mondays, so that made it perfect for a weekend get away.

   I went to Charleston 3 years ago, and I really liked the city. When I went then I was with a friend, and she and I did things my husband has no interest in. So even though I didn't go to a new place, I did a lot of new things and just did some more exploring. We also took a little road trip out of the city and visited a new (to both the hubby and myself) national park. 

  I haven't  had a chance to go through most of my photos yet,  since I'm posting this Monday  evening. We had an early morning flight that left Charleston this morning at 7 AM. We watched the sun rise as the plane taxied to the runway.

    It was a very early morning since we needed to get to the airport around 5 AM. We had received a text from the airline that they expected long security lines and so we took their advice. Luckily it's only around a 2 hour flight, and once we got into Manchester we stopped for breakfast (whoops, forgot to take a photo)  and then were still home before noon. After we unloaded the car the hubby and I both took  nice long naps. 😉

  

   Whoops, Google decided to publish this when I hit save, so hopefully no one will read this until I am finished with it. 😉 And if you get here and the post ends, please refresh to get the whole post.

   Anyhow, I need a drink for T day, and I did remember to snap a photo of a cup of tea I had on the plane this morning while I was reading my latest mystery.

     And here is my drink for T day this week.

    That's it for me. I'll have more trip photos in some later posts. Have a super T day and start to this new week.

  

  

 

Sort of Mid-Week Art and Other Things

    Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. I hope your week is going well. We've had some wet weather, but luckily (or not so luckily for the drought we still have from last year) it hasn't been all day rains. And in between showers, it's been warm and beautiful outside.  I've been trying to get a bit of outside chores done, which is something I always get excited to do in spring. If only that excitement would last all season...grin, but once it gets hot, I would rather look at the gardens than do all this big spring cleaning. 😏

    Today I am joining Gillena for Her Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge at Art Journal Journey. 

   I started this page on some white watercolor paper. I fussy cut the tree, the bottom bird and the leaves (all one image) from a paper shopping bag I received from the local bird store when I went to get a seed tube. I used matte medium to glue it down. 

   I then took an old chickadee stamp (from Stamp in the Hand) and stamped it first directly onto my page, and then onto some brown paper-bag paper. I fussy cut it and added it to my page covering up the first stamped image. I used a white paint pen to highlight the white spot around the head.

    I used a green paint pen to color over the leaves on the trees since they were originally the same brown as the trunk. Then I took a stencil and some light blue paint and added some spots of texture and color on the background. I decided the page was still too white so I took some yellow watercolor paint and added it to brighten up the sky.

   The 3 flying birds came from an older Hero Arts stamp set. The Birds of a feather quote came from the same Stamp in the Hand set as the chickadee did. I am not sure who made the paper that I fussy cut the word fly high from.

   Then I finished my page by adding a feather I found in my yard and outlined the Birds of a Feather quote.

   And speaking of birds, I've had a pine warbler visiting my bird feeder lately. You can also see the seed tube he/she is sitting on that came in the paper bag I used on my page today. 

And the grackles are back too. I like how I caught  this motion in this next photo.

And once again, the turkeys are back.

   That's all for me today.  And just an FYI- I won't be around for the weekend ahead starting tomorrow, so I won't be joining  any Friday or Sunday challenges as I usually do.  Have a great rest of your week and weekend ahead plus start to the new week. I'll be back in the blogosphere next week-either Monday or Tuesday.