Relax Your Mind

A relaxed day, half spent painting on the flowers. Easy way to spend 5 hours. They are finally shaping up. I am now happy with the basic form of them (finally) and tomorrow will do more work on fine tuning highlights and shadows.

The weather was very stormy part of the day and windy the rest. Not a good day to photograph bees, as had been planned. Maybe tomorrow ? Ask me about that next post....

Pretty Reminiscences

I love carousels and have had a love for them since a child visiting Balboa Park in San Diego (my grandparents lived in San Diego). I really loved the San Diego Zoo too, and the carousel was just outside, and had real antique carousel animals and real brass rings you could try to reach (and if you did you got a prize !).

Here is a carousel in Paris, just below Sacre Coeur up in Montmartre. It was lovely and lit up at dusk, with real antique animals, and check out the leaping horse at the top of the carousel. Magical !

In Prague, I saw this newer carousel, inside a shopping centre and with a lovely white horse with a grey mane with sea blue and orange colors on its saddles.

And then I saw an antique carousel horse in Virginia City Nevada, in the window of an antique seller. It is very pretty, but perhaps a bit sad to be parted from its original partners ? Maybe it will be happy when it goes to a new home, rather than wait in a shop window. If it could have been easier for me to ship it home, I might have considered acquiring it myself !

And this last animal is a carved animal, polar bear with a Father Christmas, seen in a shop window in the old town of Vilnius. I really like polar bear figures (and I have a Steiff polar bear I bought in Germany over 25 years ago). I wish I had had more time to send this one home...but with 4 weeks of biz travel ahead of me, it did not seem practical. What a great centrepiece this would make for a holiday table !

I don't think I want to stop photographing these sorts of carved statuettes and images, they have sweet adorable expressions and are decorated with lovely detail. Decorative art in their own right, and provoking imagination too. These figures have a magical presence to them that is very appealing.

Crimson, Magenta, & Alizarin

I have been working on a line of vintage and antique map covered cahier notebooks for the www.winstonpook.etsy.com shop, my new launch of a vintage and upcycled wares shop on etsy. I decided to keep the art shop (www.bluekoistudio.etsy.com) and the vintage and upcycled craft one separate, as a lot of other etsy sellers also do. I have used winstonpook as a handle for buying and selling on ebay for a fair few years now, named after two of our beloved cats, Winston and Pook (Maggie helps too >^..^<). Check it out, or follow the link below on the right in the etsy mini box called winstonpook to see what I am selling there.

Today I had a few color themes going. In addition to the maps, I found a vintage Campari advert and it almost was the perfect size for covering an 8 x 5 inch moleskin cahier. With a stripe of vintage map trim, it worked great (and I found an antique map border with "Rome" on it, perfect !) So here is the color theme for today, a brilliant crimson ground shown on this advert.

Cut over to painting. And it is more work on flowers and the color theme continues. Apologies for the golden cast in the pic, due to flash as it was too late in the day to get a good daylit photo. I have a color chart there with some of my favorite reds and brilliant pinks used in oils, but I am painting in acrylics (and I have most of these in that medium too). Today I used magenta and alizarin to work on the flowers. More to do tomorrow, with more and better light. I really must start working on the painting earlier...but I do so enjoy ending my day with the painting, I wind down and have a happy evening when I do this :)

To close: Here is Winston, whose picture I am using as a winstonpook etsy shop avatar. Just as shown here, he chomps on a perfect yellow rose bud (he and Maggie are Rose Grazers).