Fun with fall leaves

Twin Leaves

A great way to spend a cloudy, wet day in early fall is to paint something you love in the brightest colors you can find. I love leaves, and now, while my garden is starting to turn fall colors, is a great time to paint them.

Turning Leaf

I used an old maple leaf from my yard to do these. The first one was in watercolor, and in the second I wanted to duplicate the same brightness and intensity with acrylics.

Lots of fun!

Inspired by Autumn

Fall Fantasy

I was playing more with watercolors, try out my new hake brushes, and decided to use them (but not the hakes) on an inspiration I got this last weekend. I wanted to do an abstract of leaf shapes, but then as I was drawing it out I decided to make one of them more realistic. I stole its coloring from one of my O Isami leaves, so it's all pretty made up. But it does represent how excited I am to see the fall colors, especially in the local maples, and the leaves coming down in the wind. I love leaves, but I'm a sucker for the bightly colored ones. I really love them.

As long as I'm posting, I'll put up a poster for the next art fair I'll be at, in SE Portland at Ardenwald Elementary School on Nov. 22, and a couple of other things I've been working on lately.

I'm not sure if this painting of the grape arbor at Villa Catalana is finished, but I'm done working on it. It's as good as I can make it now.

Grape arbor in summer

I wanted to share my first painting with the hake brushes, not because it's any good (it isn't) but to give you an idea of what your first experiment might look like. It is possible, and fun, to use them to get something that looks like tree foliage. I think I can get better with them in time. At least I've still got the back side of this that I can use for another painting.

First try with hake brushes

I used to do watercolors before I retired, and I do like not having to throw the dry paint away. But, when you screw up something on an acrylic painting, you can always just keep painting on top of it. So they're both fun, in their own way.

Plein air the EASY way

I've finally found an easy way to do plein air—out in my garden! It takes me two trips to get everything down there—I use an old one-gallon bucket to carry all the little stuff. I have a pretty comfortable cloth folding chair and a small metal easel I've taken down and stashed under the overhang of the woodshed so I don't have to carry them down every time. I use two little plastic lawn furniture side tables, one on each side of my chair, to hold everything but the painting. When I'm done, I turn one of the tables upside down and set it on the other one, so neither gets fir sap dripped on it. Fir sap drips on everything out there, even me. Leaving the tables out where I set up means I can get my chair back in the same spot from one time to the next.

I wanted to try watercolor first, just to make it as easy as possible. It took me five sessions of about two hours each to get this one to where I can't make it any better.

The first day I felt very guilty and started telling myself I really should be working. I had to remind myself that I was working—learning how to paint plein air! After the first time that wasn't a problem. It's been wonderful just enjoying my garden for a change. I found that when I sit there long enough for the birds to ignore me, I start seeing the whole place come to life. The clouds blowing around, birds going about their business, an intermittent breeze moving through the treetops, different kinds of insects checking me and my gear out. I got to where I can ignore the weeds I see, look at my plants without thinking of things I need to do, and just enjoy painting.