blooming fruit trees

Spring has at least partially sprung here in my part of N California. My fruit trees are in various stages of bloom, including the totally non-producing-two-years-a-row plum tree. So glad we planted a few fruit trees when we moved in here. I've never had fruit trees before and it's so cool to walk out in the morning and pick a sun-warm nectarine to cut up on my cereal.
Not shown, the peach tree. It's in bloom but I couldn't get a decent angle on a single flower without getting in my own light, etc.

Baby apricot, about an inch long.
Looks like it's gonna be another record year for apricots.
Sure wish my nectarine produced like this.

Nectarine blossom, a lovely pink. This tree is just gorgeous
right now. Hope it goes crazy with fruit.

Plum blossom. This silly tree didn't do *anything* the first year.
No blossoms, no fruit. Second year it had a few blossoms but
no fruit. This year - ba-boom! Lots of blossoms which hopefully
translates into lots of plums!

Just a cluster of plum blossoms cause I'm so impressed with
this tree this year.

flowers in the house

Pretty much the only time I manage to think of bringing flowers inside is when SmallButCharming does her occasional Monday call for flowers in the house. I don't have a lot of cutting flowers but did manage to come up with some lavender, a few springs of tea tree, and a couple salvia stems. Very pretty on the mantle. No idea who the wedding couple it. It's just a vintage photo from an antique shop. I have about a hundred of them and change them out now and then.

flowers in the house

I follow Jane at SmallButCharming, who posts cats, food, gardens, and hosts Flowers In The House, which I have enjoyed in the past but never managed to participate in.

I love the idea and I love flowers in my house, but I'm usually too lazy to pick them and too cheap to buy them. However, at the store yesterday they had an all white bouquet that I couldn't resist. I added in some tea tree from the back yard, stuck in all in a big white jug, and I love it.

The flowers normally live on the kitchen counter since that's where we hang out, but that area isn't real conducive to pretty pictures so I shot them on the little table in the entryway. It gets nice morning light and already has some interesting things on it.

Click thru her link and visit everyone's Flowers In The House!

freebie wildflower scan & APCs for a swap

My friend Moneka gave me a neat little book - Wild Flowers of America - published in March 1932. I love the soft little paintings of each flower. It's falling apart with ancient scotch tape here and there, so I carefully took it all apart this morning, erasing pencil scribbles left by some bored child. I've scanned 9 of the images plus the front cover, inside cover and front and back of the intro page. Use them however you like, including works to sell. Just please don't sell them as images.


I made gel medium transfers out of a few. This is one of my favorite things to do with almost any image. It gives a softer image and allows the background to show thru. I do mine with a single fairly thin coat of gloss gel medium, and have to be very careful rubbing the paper off cause they tear easily.


Here's the finished APCs for a swap on ATCsForAll.com. First layer was a thick coat of gesso with torn pieces of green tissue paper mushed into it. They warped terribly and I thought I'd have to abandon them but a few days under Our Heritage of World Literature (the heaviest book I own and whose only use is sitting on top of things that need smashing), and they flattened out enough to use.


Stamped a text stamp in black, then put down the flower transfers. Stamped a dragonfly onto a regular old white paper napkin, then tore the edges and applied them with gel medium. Added a word from an old book, inked the edges and they're done! Yay. And just a few days ago I had no ideas for these things and was thinking of dropping the swap.


I really like the layered look that gel medium transfers give, with the stamped text showing thru. Try them, if you haven't yet.

dandelion goes b/w

Kim Klassen is having a texture... challenge, I guess, altho she isn't calling it that. You just need to use one or more of her many free textures on a flower photo. It starts tomorrow and I assume she'll post a way to link a blog post, so I'm getting ready now.

I started out with a dandelion image I took a few summers ago, in our front yard. Cropped it more or less square, then duplicated it. I began dragging Kim's various filters onto it, playing with the opacity and fill percentages. (Honestly, I don't even know the diff between those two things, I just adjust till I like the look. I really must learn more about PS.)

I settled on one called luminous - darker around the edges with some just barely visible text. Changed the duplicate layer to multiply mode. Played with levels until I had the white tufts positively glowing, made it a little more contrasty. I liked it well enough but it wasn't really blowing my skirt up, to borrow a Pioneer Womanism. 

Then I had the brilliant idea to desaturate it. That did the trick. Gave it a vintage look, like a faded old picture you might find tucked in the pages of a book, forgotten on some long ago summer's day.

phone phlowers (or maybe fone flowers)

Got a smart phone a few months ago (finally) and first thing I did was download a bunch of camera apps. Because that's what smart phones are for, right? Too. Much. Fun. My favorite one is FX Camera, and specifically the toy camera filter. But the Polaroid filter is cool too. How did I ever make it thru the day without a smart phone???

dead leaves in pink pot - this is the toy filter, makes everything a little yellowy
and emphasizes the shadows

past-their-prime roses - the toy filter again

one of my hydrangeas - toy filter here and the polaroid filter below

the same hydrangea buds as above only using the polaroid filter - the pink effect looks great on these flowers

more hydrangeas, more toy filter

same shot, polaroid filter

pink flowers are...

...one of my most favorite things. They make me smile. So when I saw these at the store, slightly past their prime, but only $4, I thought about it for only a few seconds, then stuck them in my cart.


Once home, I pulled off the dead flowers and stuck them in an old canning jar on my kitchen table. I don't even know what they are. Snapdragons, maybe? They remind me of sweet peas.


The colors in them are so soft, fading from a true pink to the palest shade of blush, and the green stems are the perfect shade of green. I'd have this color scheme in every room of my house if it was up to me.


They'll be gone in a few days, their beauty dropped bloom by bloom into the trash, but for now, they live on my table and bring a smile to my face every time I catch sight of them.

while walking the dog

I often take my camera when I run the dog around the block each morning before running off to work, but I mostly forget to ever get it out of my pocket and actually take a picture or two. Yesterday I remembered.

 Gorgeous bougainvillea in the sun, a bit blown out by the light, glowing pink.

Sun thru a red maple or some sort of red-leaved tree.

Lovely pink tinged white rose. 

Lipstick pink rose, one of 50 on the bush.

Faded glory...

Kid down the street did the edge of every piece of pavement
near his house. Looks like lace.

The half barrel in front of my house.

in which I paint... more or less

My mom was a good artist. She worked in oils mostly and I grew up with the smell of turpentine in the air. She decorated all the cards she sent me after I moved out of the house and she moved to Ohio. She was doing mail art long before we knew it had a name. I have all those in a drawer and since they mean nothing to anyone but me, I'll begin to use them in my journals.

I also have many of her paintings - some weird avant-garde cats in non-cat colors of turquoise and lime green, scruffy little owls painted on old boards, still lifes of fruit in earthenware bowls, old barns standing in fields. I have them hanging all over my house and enjoy looking at them. I can remember some of them on the easel when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, artistic talent must skip a generation, like baldness, because I don't have much of it, at least in the painting/drawing realm. I haven't worked real hard at it, but I'm definitely not a natural, like she was. But I recently bought the book Nature Inspired by Tracie Lyn Huskamp. In it, she shows a variety of ways to capture nature in your work - photography, leaf rubbings, sun prints, flower pounding, and, yes, painting.

She has you trace the rough form, transfer it to muslin, and then just... paint. I kept the book on my end table for weeks and I'd look at it in the evening while DH watched bad sci-si. (did you know that 'bad sci-fi' is a genre all its own?) and I kept coming back to the painting pages. She uses birds as her examples, and I really wanted to paint a bird. So... the other night I did it. I slowed down my usual rush-thru-things tendency long enough to actually paint something that doesn't look like an alien you can tell is a bird.

The bird in the book on the left - my bird on the right. Can you even tell the difference??!?!?

His head is blurry cause I had too much water at first, but you cut the bird out and glue or stitch it into your journal, so the bad part will be cut away.

I'm ridiculously pleased with him.

Here's the cover of the book with my bird and palette. I had paint left, so since I was channeling Monet on such a roll, I painted some flowers! The pen outline and charcoal shading really help make these look like flowers.

They're on cold press w/c paper that'll eventually be bound into a nature journal, along with this pink flower haiku spread and a few others I've finished so far. I've been collecting garden/nature images, ephemera, etc for a while and am about ready to dive into my envelope of goodies and do some collage spreads.

I recommend this book, by the way. It's full of good tutorials and thoughtful prose about how to collect and preserve bits of nature for your journal or several other projects that she gives directions for. It'd be a nice gift for any artsy nature lover on your Christmas list. No affiliation, yadda, yadda - just happy with the book.

the rarely-blooming gardenia... blooms

I planted this thing a bit over 4 years ago when we moved in here. It had a bloom on it when I bought it, and bloomed again (1 flower's worth) in 2008, but has never flowered since. I'm sure it's missing some key ingredient in the soil but I'm a tough love gardener and have only watered it and maybe given it a shot or two of Miracl-Gro. I think I googled gardenias once, but then my hard boiled egg timer went off and that was the end of that.

But this morning, walking back inside from waving DH off to work, I saw it.

A bloom.

A big beautiful gardenia.

three gardens

We'll start with last year's garden, which is a sorry mess right now. We blocked it all off from the dog with a fence that I had to sort of crawl under over by a post out of sight on the right. Not gonna do that again.

 

Here is this year's edition. Three Sweet 100 tomatoes. That's it. Gonna be a lot of visit's to the farmer's market this year...

 And last but certainly not least, here is a garden I produced yesterday afternoon in the studio. The background was done a few weeks ago and was nothing special, just mottled pink. But while blog surfing, I saw this on Roben-Marie's blog and was inspired.

This is one of the few times I've ever just cut loose and started throwing stuff on the page. I'm usually little Miss gotta-figure-it-all-out-in-advance, but this was totally off the cuff. I felt myself gettin' in the groove and just letting it flow, and that hasn't happened to me since I started all this art journal stuff. It was great.

The background was acrylics, the flowers and stems were done with water soluble oil pastels gone over with a water brush, the spots were stenciled thru sequin scrap, and the black detailing is acrylic paint using a water brush.

I did just a little journaling after I took the pics, talking about how this was a summer of transition and that this may be my only garden - painted flowers on paper.

I'm absurdly pleased with it. :-))

floral Friday (photo heavy post)

There's a house about a mile from me that has the most gorgeous hollyhocks in the spring. The vast majority of them are self-seeded, so they're all over the place - inside the fence, outside the fence, between the sidewalk and the street - just about any place there's dirt. I drive by there a lot and think 'I should stop and take some pictures of those darn hollyhocks before they're done.' Well, today, as soon as the thought entered my mind, I pulled the car to the curb and spent a few minutes snapping away.

Behold the hollyhock loveliness...

the lone sunflower among the pinks and reds