Happy Summer ! Well... it is on THIS side of the world currently.
I'm sharing a gif of my new windsock before my art. It is lightweight and dances easily in the breeze. I ordered it from Amazon and although I read the dimensions, I was humorously surprised when I opened it to find that it is very small. Somehow my mind didn't picture it in it's real size. I had to laugh at myself. What tha hay ! I hung it anyway. I put an extension hook like some folks use for flower pots so it would hang down a ways from the eve of the porch, hoping it would catch more wind if it wasn't up at the ceiling. That's alright though, I will soon order several bigger ones so I can watch them out my front window as I go through the living room during the day.
It made a fun gif.... right?
I painted this piece before I painted the last pink and white flower pot that I showed you.
I didn't know what I was going to paint, I just sat down and started swishing some happy colors about.
Most of what you see here was not supposed to show on the final piece, it was just a colorful abstract background for..... whatever I came up with to partially add over it. No worries.... just carefree paint swishing.
My pieces normally have very thick paint, many more layers than this, even though many of these colors still overlap.
In fact, I don't love the texture of the canvas to show through the paint most of the time.
BUT !..... When I finished this under-layer I decided to let it dry before I put whatever it was that I would decide to put over it next. It sat around here for a day or two. I kept looking at it as I came through the living room. Something about it made me like the way it had fallen together. At first the word "tropical" wanted to come through and then I thought... tropical? What do I know about tropical? ..... why, it's simply a Summer Day and with that, I decided it was done.
I take process photos as I go along when I paint. It is not really to show the process exactly, but just different versions of the painting as I go along. I keep those photos or at least a few of them, even if it totally gets painted over, never to be seen again. (except in a photo). A few times, I painted over something that much, much later, I randomly came across the photo and I thought to myself "why didn't I like that then? why didn't I think that was done?" Remembering that and finding that I liked the way this fell together, I decided to let it be.
While I am painting in ways that are not my norm, this might as well be one of them too ! It's kind of a hot mess 😉 but I kind of like it. When I was growing up, we spent our summer days outside playing with the other neighborhood kids, riding our bikes, playing kick-the-can, playing in the creek and giant sand piles. There was always so much to do, so much fun to be had. sigh....those days without a care in the world except for what fun thing we could do next.
I worked today and I was supposed to answer phones all day. About 2:20 in the afternoon, our server went down (YAY !!) .... and we couldn't work. I figured it would be right back up as our IT is pretty awesome, however, it was down 2 hours ! It came up about 4:10 and it didn't look like the phones were turned back on, but at 10 till 5 my phone rang (Phooey !!) and a client wanted me to do a lot of things for her (ugh !) so there I was, stuck on the phone past quitting time for who knows how long. I had resigned myself to it. THEN... 10 minutes after 5 ...... our server went down again ! YAY !!! saved by a broken server !
