Update September 7, 2011

Hi all,

It has been a busy summer with traveling early in the summer to the East Coast and getting to spend a week with three of my youngest grandchildren in South Carolina and my son and Daughter-in-law. Had a whirlwind week busy all the time and did a lot of photography mainly of the grands.

Then on to Connecticut to visit family and up to Cape Cod again to visit family and then into Massachusetts to do some historical research and enjoy that beautiful state.

Then my brother visited for a week so again no painting. Gardening then took over and we worked every day trying to get some veggies to grow.



But what I had done early in the year was register for a week in Florida in August with some painting friends. They are folks on a web site that I belong to paintingfriends.com and we all gathered in Indian Rocks Beach, FL for a week of painting. We had demos lead but several very good professional artists and I really learned a lot. Have I finished anything? Nope but Am working on it now. Here is a photo of the group with our instructor Bob Hague and portraits that had a different technique. It was very informative a lots of fun.

As you can see there is a lot of work needed for me to learn this technique. I did do another morning's work on this portrait but think I need to go in and try and make this poor girl look like something.























The very first day of painting Mollie Jones gave a wonderful cactus demo and we worked all day on this. Since it had been so so long since I had painting I had a lot of fears to conquer and just remember that it was just paper. I am enjoying this painting and Mollie is such a great teacher. Of course, I am prejudiced as she was my roomie for the week and I cannot tell you all the giggles and laughter that went on.

I did work on this since I have been home and this is where I am so far. I am in the midst of canning produce so not much time to paint and am trying to take my time with this one which I really like so far. Love the blending of the colors and LOVE painting on a larger scale. I just have to remind myself not to be in a rush. The other paintings are there waiting for me and just go slowly and try to achieve what I want to. Do plan to paint more cacti as they are fascinating and have a lot of photos that I took on previous trips of different types of cacti.


















A lovely lady named Peg gave a talk on painting clouds. We didn't try to paint clouds this week but we sure did photograph them and with Hurricane Irene imminent the skies produced fantastic cloud formations. Will definitely be going to try and paint just clouds for awhile and put to use what Peg talked about. Here is just one of my photographs.












Another demo that Mollie gave was of strawberries in a crystal bowl. What fun this is. It is intricate but sometimes one needs to do this as well. I have not done anything more on this since I left SPLASH but plan to finish this. Here is the group with their crystals and we also spent time photographing setups of different types of crystal with different fruits like this..



















And this is the end of a wonderful week in Florida and the end of my summer. I plan to be painting more so keep tuned for updates. I find by posting my progress it helps me keep encourage to go on with my love of painting and photography.