Lilies in St. Louis

I just came back from a short trip to St. Louis to visit my parents. Much to the surprise of our family, my Mom had decided to participate in the Ms. Senior Missouri pageant, so I joined her cheering section for the show. Did she ever wow the audience with her dancing and amazing baton-twirling skills!

While Mom was busy with day-long rehearsals, my Dad and I went on a long bike-ride around Creve Coeur Lake. He took me to some wetlands along one portion of the trail. The water lilies were in full bloom and blanketed a huge portion of the water. I'd so love to take a little boat out on the water and paddle my way gently through the lilies:


















Tall grass prevented me from getting closer to the water's edge, so this was the best 'close-up' I could take:

I've had an idea for a painting nagging at me for some time that just so happens to feature water-lilies. I'm not sure when I'll get around to actually painting it, but at least I'll have handy reference when I do.

Squirrels & Stick Insects

They say everything's bigger in Texas - and when it comes to the local bugs, they weren't kidding. This little (or not so little) guy was hanging out in front of my neighbor's front door for about a day:He's a giant stick insect. It's probably hard to tell from the picture, but he was about 5-6 inches long. Seems he wandered a little too far away from his forest home where I'm sure he's most excellently camouflaged. Hopefully he's since found his way safely back to the trees following his little adventure amongst the man-made.

Realizing I hadn't posted anything in such a long time, I scrounged around a bit for something and came up with this drawing:
This was an unused drawing for a private commission. We opted for something larger and with more characters, which I'll post in the near-future. I still like this drawing and I've got the color well-visualized in my mind for it, so maybe I'll come back to it some day...

Mexican Hats & Indian Blankets

The wildflowers are still exploding here and the blues and pinks seem to have given way to yellows and reds. I don't remember them being quite so spectacular last year. Perhaps the weather conditions are more favorable this year? Or maybe I just wasn't getting out much around the same time last year. On a morning walk, I stumbled across a steeply sloping field of Mexican Hats:
Indian Blankets quite literally blanket the ground along my husband's drive to work. He also located another large field of the flowers on a different road much to my delight:













I can't think that I've ever lived somewhere where I could walk through such a picture postcard flower-scape until we moved here to Texas. Scattered throughout the dominant Indian Blankets are various other flowers. I think these are coreopsis:

Sadly, my very amateur photography skills fail to do the landscape justice. But flowers always brighten my day, so maybe they'll brighten yours too.

All Finished!

Well, I've finally finished my most recent book project and just shipped the art off to my publisher this week. The book is due out Spring 2010 from Charlesbridge Publishing. Here are a couple pieces from Pythagoras and the Ratios - the first one will be the title page and the second is an interior page:I'm really looking forward to seeing it in print!

Field of Flowers

I'm just wrapping up on the tail-end of my book project, so hopefully I'll have some art to post soon. In the meantime, more photos...

It's wildflower season here again in central Texas and although I really haven't had much time to get outside lately, we did take a quick jaunt a couple of weeks ago to shoot a field of pink evening primrose. Chris happened to spot this distant field as we were driving on the elevated highway you can see in the background and figured out how we could reach it using back-streets.





















The ground was a bit marshy, but well-worth the mud to take some good reference photos.

Hopefully we'll get outside for a bit this weekend before the summer heat sets in. We've already had some uncomfortably warm days this spring - just a prelude to what's coming...

Studio

It's been a long time since I posted anything. Between work being very busy for both my husband and myself and the dreaded cedar allergy season from which Chris suffers, we've not had a spare moment for hiking or anything else of the sort, so I still haven't much to post. I'd been holding off posting pictures of my studio for just such a lack of blog content, so now seems like a good time to go ahead and post them.

I love seeing other artist's studios and work spaces. I'm always fascinated at seeing how other people decorate their homes. I guess it's just a small glimpse into another life or way of living and that's always interesting to me. I picked up a book some time ago off a Barnes & Noble clearance shelf called Where Women Create which showcases beautiful workspaces of women in a range of creative professions. My studio is much more functional than beautiful, but hopefully some day I'll dress it up a bit.

Here's a before and after picture -"After" being the after the bomb of a large project explodes in my studio and order gives way.... It feels like a mess when I'm there working, but I think it probably doesn't look so bad in the photo:

After

I'm crazy-particular about my lighting. I always keep the natural light to the left of my desk so that my painting hand won't cast a shadow across my work. And I always have a swing-arm lamp directly over head - "working in a spotlight" as my husband would say.

And, I've a bit of good news to share - I received a "Letter of Merit" this past weekend in the SCBWI Magazine Merit contest for an illustration completed for Highlights last year. It was quite a nice surprise!

2009

I realize I'm a bit late in wishing everybody a Happy New Year, but I do hope 2009 is off to a good start for everyone! It never occurred to me in the past to make resolutions, but this year I have a few, pretty ordinary ones:

- Get up in the morning at a reasonable time. I'm not at all a morning person and my hours tend to become more and more bizarre over the course of large projects. So I'm going to attempt to drag myself out of bed earlier than usual and get on a more 'normal' schedule.

- Get some regular exercise every day. I was doing pretty well with this until the holidays and then fell off the wagon and have yet to jump back on...

- Gain about seven pounds or so. That's right. I said gain.

- Art-wise, I'm still trying not to over-work paintings, painting too thickly and what-not. And trying to loosen up a bit.

So far, the first twelve days of 2009 find me failing miserably at the first three resolutions and showing spotty results with the fourth. But it's early still, plenty of time to right myself...

And I'm really late posting these pictures. These were taken on the side of the highway on my husband's drive to work:




Decorating this particular copse of trees along the 360 appears to be an annual tradition here in Austin.

Well, it's back to work for me now. A belated Happy Holidays to all!