Sunday

  Hi everyone. I hope you've been having a lovely weekend. Our weather has finally warmed back up a bit after a pretty cold past week. We had some nights with temperatures below freezing. Hurrah for today though when it feels more like spring again.

   Today I am joining Nicole for her Sunday in the Art Room, and I'm also joining Gillena for 2 challenges.  I'll be linking  up to her  Sunday Smiles and also over to Art Journal Journey. Gillena is hosting this month and her theme is Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? 

   I was inspired to make today's page after watching a gorgeous sunset a few weeks ago. With the  sun setting behind the trees, those trees were solid black. I used this older tree stamp and black ink several times on my journal page. I then went over the images with a black Sharpie because I wanted the trees to be bolder.  

    I first colored the sky with watercolors, but then I wanted bolder colors, especially for the orange part,  so I also added some orange liquid ink to a wet paper towel and rubbed that on the page.  To make the grass I used watercolor paints  and  markers as  well as a green  Stabilo pencil. The birds are a stamp from the same set as the trees. The quote is from the same set.  I tried something just a bit different for the quote because I stamped it on color paper and then gently tore the edges away. I had hoped the pink would blend in more with the pink of the sky, but I still like how it works.

     Friday night's sky was fairly pretty, although not the  boldest colors like the view that inspired today's page. But the sun before it set created some interesting light through the evening clouds.

    And even though last week didn't feel much like spring, it's mating season for the wild turkeys. This Tom was strutting his stuff around the lawn one morning. 

     (Excuse the photos because if I stepped outside the show would have been over so I needed to snap these through the window.)

And here's the lady he was hoping to impress. I'm not sure if he did or not.

    Earlier in the week I noticed him in the woods also all puffed up and trying to impress some lady. He was just far enough off that when I looked at first I thought it might be a bear in the woods. These turkeys get pretty large when they puff up like that, especially from a distance.

     Later he came back just to scrounge up some ground scraps from the bird feeder. The show was over by then.

   That's all for me today. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and start to the new week. 

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.