Artist?

I have always wanted to paint. I can remember watching Bob Ross on PBS make his "happy little trees". It looked so easy.... Well, Jason gave me the night off to tap into my inner Monet. I thought I would share my evening as an artist.

We started off with a basic sketch of the trees we would be painting on a white canvas. The pencil lines are hard to see, but the instructors do the sketching before the class starts.

 

Filling in the back ground color proved to be a little tricky.  I had to leave an outline of the trunks and branches for later.  The perfectionist in me was frustrated by my lack of paint brush control.  I would see where I wanted the paint to go, and my hand go some place else. 

                                      

With the back ground colors on the canvas, we began to add layers of leaves in shades of gold and orange.

We also added black lines for the tree trunks.  

To finish the painting, we added white to the Aspen trees and more leaves in shades of red and even green.  I think the green leaves are a nice relief from all the fall colors.  Check out the inspiration painting below.

There were probably 30 people at the class sipping wine (letsartparty is BYOB), and painting together.  It was interesting to walk around the room and see how different the paintings turned out. While I am still as paint brush challenged as ever, the good instructors and carefully structured art classes at Lets Art Party will have me back to add another masterpiece to my own budding art gallery at home!

LetsArtParty

The Chickens

In May 2011, we began our Chicken adventure.  Why?  We are still wondering that.  Actually, we had heard of other people in the area with backyard flocks and we thought, why not? We would have fresh eggs and fertilizer for the garden (boy, were we right about that one). We started out with 3 chickens.  Henny, Penny and Candy.  Candy turned out to be a rooster, so back he went to the farm.  We replaced him with 2 more chickens, Nutter-Butter and Robin.  Again, Robin turned out to be a rooster, so back to the farm he went.  We replaced him with 2 more chickens, Daisy and Mei Mei, bringing our flock to 5.  Things we have learned.  Our son loves the chickens.  He talks to them, feeds them, collects eggs and tells everyone about them.  The girls are pretty social.  They follow us around the yard, hoping for treats.  So far, we have been letting them free range it during the day.  We have also learned that chickens poop, a lot, in very inconvenient places. For this reason, our project before we start the spring garden is going to be to convert our side yard into a chicken run.  The girls will have plenty of room to run around, and we won't be cleaning our shoes so much.  More on that later.

This is where our girls call home.

This is Penny, one of our original chickens.  She is a Cinnamon Queen (also called a sex-link).  We have 4 other chickens.  Henny, a Cinnamon Queen, Nutter-Butter, a Buff Orpington, Daisy, an Ameraucana, and Mei, Mei, a Silver Laced Wyndotte.  

 Mei, Mei is too young to lay yet so we get 3-4 eggs a day from the other 4 chickens.  Daisy, the Ameraucana lays blue green eggs, but my picture does not do the color justice.  The ceramic egg carton is from Anthropology and was a Christmas present from my sister-in-law.

(this image came from Amazon.com)

I bought this book for my son because the chickens on the cover look like Henny and Penny.  We also found the names for Daisy and Mei Mei from this book.  Jan Brett's illustrations are so detailed and beautiful!