wordless wednesday

Happy Spring!

wordless wednesday

As a one-time only explanation, I have been enjoying Carlene's (Taylor Maide) Wordless Wednesdays for months and intending to participate, but keep forgetting..... Inspired by Right Brain Planner, it's an opportunity to share photos of whatever floats your boat......

week 32 for 365/2 (part 1 &2)

Aug 4-10 - by the way, I'm well over half the year into my 2nd consecutive 365 project and going strong. Hope you're still enjoying following along.

#216 - a couple months ago I participated in a journal page "round robin" adaptation where each participant picked a theme and then we made and sent a standardized size of folio off to each person. My theme was flowers and I received some wonderful pages, which I shared at the time.  As I've been considering how to bind it, I realized I wanted to add my own page to tie it all together.

The folios are made on watercolor paper, so I always used my watercolors on at least the center section - here I just played with splats and smooshes of watercolor then searched out the flower shapes hidden in the splats.  I'm pleased with the results here......

#217 - front and back pages:

The front fold and what will be the front of my book has the word flowers (it's punch-out letters from scrapbooking), stamps, patterned paper and my artistamp from the MMSA swap.  On the back page, keeping with the grid idea from the front, I just sketched some random flowers, added a poppy washi, and gave the details of the swap.  Now I just have to bind all the pieces together - I'll show you the result when I get that done.

#218 - I ordered 12 new colors of Inktense pencils from Dick Blick and they just arrived - I'm in heaven!  I just love doodling/drawing with a pen, coloring with Inktense, and painting with my water pen.  (drawn in my documented life journal)

#219, 220 - some gelli print play for a swap.

I made lots so I could pick 10 different, hopefully interesting, prints to send to my swap partner.....

#221, 222 - a couple more lettering "art" pieces on index cards - playing, playing......

All sorts of fun playing, experimenting, trying all sorts of things.  This is sure fun!  Take time to play!

week #21 for 365/2 (part 1)

May 19-25

#138 - finished working on Laurie's round robin journal pages:

Inktense pencils coloring in doodled flowers on the back of the folio.

#139 - the center spread started with ink sprays and drips, layered with colored tissue papers and topped with a napkin flower (love the translucency of those napkins!) then the writing is with a Signo white pen - "flower" in many languages.

#140 - some mail art. I found my spray inks did wonderful things when sprayed on slick cardboard and spritzed with water!  One has a cutout of one of my photos and the other has a hot glue doodle glued on.

Keeping busy here - hope you're having a creative, productive week......

My favorite part of spring in my yard is my clematis - it's gorgeous on the railing of our deck!

my back yard

APR #27 (hosted by Jenn at Just Add Water Silly) this week wants a peek at what's going on in my back yard - literally or figuratively. I'm short on time this week since we're headed out of town for a little vacation (again!) and I've been scrambling about. Since I'm really not much of a sketcher/drawer, but I am a bit of a photographer, here's my back yard:

I love the color in the red grass and this is in a big pot on my deck.  We've actually had sun recently and the grass leaf shadows caught my attention.

One of my favorite things to do is kick back on the deck with a glass of ice tea (that would Long Island Ice Tea) and enjoy the occasional flash of sunshine!

We have a nice big yard - lots of room for a party!  The windows seen here are my office where this computer is and I spend most of my free time. I have a great view out to the back yard and have planted blooming things in the bed on the right.

I have flowers planted in pots that line the perimeter of the whole deck - I absolutely LOVE looking out and seeing flowers from spring to fall.

We grow dahlias and revel in their color and size every year. We're too lazy to dig them up and as long as they keep coming back and looking so good, we're going to leave them alone! :)

I only paid $5 each for these rose bushes as kind of an experiment to see how roses would do on the deck and this is the second year of stunning blooms - now that's a bargain!

So that's a brief tour of my yard and garden, such as it is.  I don't know if I grow flowers mostly to cut and bring in the house or to photograph - I enjoy both so much.  Thanks for wandering down my garden path with me.

in the garden

Artists PlayRoom is focusing on the garden this week.  Our garden isn't blooming much yet - the peonies and dahlias don't even have buds!  But, I have some from last year - the exact same plants, so it's only a little cheat.  I'm resorting to photos this week instead of painting since I'm short on time and long on challenges.....

A little photoshop playing - dahlia on a mirror tile.

Can you tell I love my macro setting?  Our plot of dahlias was so pretty but we didn't dig them up in the fall so we're hoping they're as big and lovely this year.

Had to include Dan tending his dahlias :)

Nearby there's a little pocket botanical garden that I love to visit - it's filled with hellebores, hyacinth, and crocosmia in the spring, peonies, roses galore, all sorts of iris and lilies, rhodys and lots of plants I don't know....

I'm really not much of a gardener myself but I LOVE visiting and soaking up the beauty of a garden. Dan has become accustomed to visiting botanical gardens everywhere we travel....think we've found one in most every country we've visited and now he enjoys them as much as me.  You know what I love best?  I don't have to take care of the plants but get to fully enjoy them! :)