A little moonlight

I finished this painting a month ago, but I've been too distracted with the beginning of gardening season to get it outside to take a photo of it. It's my second attempt to use my wet-surface ink technique on a canvas panel, and I feel like this one is a lot more successful because I was able to retain almost all of the textures created in the wet surface inking process. I did almost ruin it trying to use acrylic paints to enhance the textures, but I was able to stop myself in time and remove them, then continue using the inks. The difference in results is attributable to the transparency of the inks.

 I would like it a bit better if the colors had been lighter, but this one just came out dark and I don't yet have a way to fix that. Maybe in the future.

In like a lion, out like a wet, grumpy lion

 First rainbow of 2011

March in the Pacific North West—well, the trees love it. And if they're happy, then I'm happy. So far this season I've measured over 13 more inches of rain than we got by the end of March last year. Pretty wet. But at least we're finally getting some sunbreaks when the temperature is over 45º and I'm getting outside to get a few things done. Been working in my veggie garden, and today I planted a brand new Darrow blueberry I just bought. A terrible thing happened to my Bluecrop plants—all 5 of them—when I went out to look at their flower buds early this month, I noticed they didn't have any! I'm thinking that the big freeze we had right before Thanksgiving killed their buds right as they were forming. Only one Bluecrop has two flower buds, on a really low branch that is semi-sheltered in the branches of the blueberry next to it. My other two blueberries, a Legacy and a Darrow, both set a nice crop of buds. The Darrows are particularly fun because they're quite large, so I bought another one this morning. Lesson: don't put all your eggs in one kind of berry bush—diversify!

Dig a hole, find a rock

Typically, there was a nice big rock right where I wanted to plant it, but at least this rock was loose and came out easily. Isn't that lovely soil? Nice wet, brown clay. Mmmmm.

Last summer I was visiting a friend who lives nearby and on her back deck she had a beautiful big round bowl right at elbow height on a simple wrought iron stand, overflowing with leaf lettuces just ready to pick. I really wanted one just like hers, but pricing wrought iron stands turned out to be pretty discouraging. And forget about finding a big, good-looking shallow bowl like hers. Still haven't seen one like it. But this winter while Goodwill hunting I did find a very strange but fairly tall and sturdy vinyl-covered steel stand and a low rectangular purple plastic tub that actually fit it—sort of—so now I have a lettuce tub on my patio!

The latest style: Shabby Cheap

I filled and planted it yesterday in between showers, and laid the fir branchlets over the top as disguise. If you were a hungry finch, would you be able to tell there's tasty lettuce seed sitting right there for the taking?

 On my way down to the veggie garden this morning I found what my neighbor calls a "widowmaker" right next to one of my heavily traveled paths.

A sign from above

This one's only a little over an inch thick, but it got driven in pretty good into the dirt. This is why I don't work outside when the wind's blowing more than a medium breeze. You never know when or where one of these air-to-ground missiles is going to launch itself.

Lots of great plants are showing up in the nurseries now, and I've been out there getting my share. Got some great deals on heucheras, including my favorite Amethyst Mist. The plants are starting to pile up on my patio now.

The waiting room

Got a nice Choisya Sundance that will look really great with the Amethyst Mist, Tiramisu heucheras and more hellebores. The soil is warm enough to plant now at 42º, all I'm waiting for now is for it to be a bit less soggy (too much to ask?) and the air to be a bit warmer. There's no sign of 60º yet, not up here in the toes of the foothills of the Cascades. The weatherman said last week that we'll usually see it around April 11th, and that's only a couple weeks away.

Hellebore Heaven—at last!

I love hellebores! I'm so hungry for flowers this time of year, and here they show up with their great colors and keep blooming till the next garden players are ready to take over the performance. When a late afternoon sunbeam backlit this young, dark red beauty, I grabbed my camera and ran outside to get a picture. In the shade it looks like dark mahogany, but when the sun hit it, it really looked this red. Ahhhhh.

Both the red and this pink are unnamed seedlings. I think it will be many years before I have enough hellebores. Tough, evergreen, drought tolerant, need only a little bit of sun, love bare clay devoid of humus, bloom for weeks and weeks—and some make babies for you!

A dachshund triple portrait

This last month I've been working on another dachshund portrait, this time a triple study of Boomer and his two housemates. I was really amazed at how well this went. I'm not a fan of photorealism, but it does help a lot in creating likenesses. I wonder how many more dachshund studies I would have to do before the forms and proportions became engraved in my mind, and I could begin to draw them from my memories. Or any subject, for that matter—trees or flowers or clouds or mountains.

In any case, this one has been fun, and interesting, and time well spent.

Sunshine, snow, mudbugs—and Spring!

What a treat, to wake up to a snow blanket over everything, and yet know that Spring is coming soon! Not until the hydrangea buds have to make it through another two nights of brrrrrr temperatures, and some additional number of nights around freezing, but it's coming!

I know it by the hellebores who refuse to be cowed...

I know it by the sunshine lighting up the colored glass...

I see it in the glowing clouds shining through the trees...

and even in the skeletons of gardens past...

it's in the sky, the clouds, the trees, in the small things you only see under your feet, alive and growing. It's in the sun returning, in the birds going after mudbugs. It's almost here!

Publish book...check!

Two and a half years ago I wrote a book on menopause, and spent a lot of time looking for a way to publish it without breaking my budget. I looked at publishers, agents, marketing campaigns, and self publishing packages from printers. I read books on how to write letters to everyone in the publishing industry, I got lists of agents and what they handled, and lists of publishers and what they publish. I researched my market online, I went to Powell's and skimmed through every book they had on menopause, and still thought mine had possibilities. I got it copyrighted, wrote my first query letter to an agent, and sent it off into oblivion. I decided I would much rather publish it myself than spend an unknown number of years writing query letters. But self publishing, besides having the potential to be the fast track to nowhere, was still not free. Even if I did all the work myself that I could, it was looking like $200 to $2000, just to get into print. But then there was the Kindle.

Last year, I started studying up on how to publish on Kindle. Amazon had been adding more and more support for authors, and I found everything I needed to know—although some of it was a bit confusing and took a while to sink in—on their forum. So bit by bit, month by month, I converted it to Kindle format, tweaked and polished and read and re-read it, again and again, and thought about all the fun and the scary things that could happen if I actually got it done.

One thing a bit different about doing a book—I couldn't have done it without lots of help from friends and family. Not like a painting!

And last Friday, on the first day of the Year Of The Rabbit, I finally got it up there on Amazon, and it's live! And except for the copyright fee, it cost me exactly nothing. I guess the age of individual self-expression has really arrived.

Got something to say? Write a book!

What lies beneath our feet

 Basalt Cliffs                                              

Acrylics on paper                             11x14

I have to admit I have a weakness for stones. I was lucky to have a father who would take us on day trips to mountains and mountain streams where we could leap around on and climb up and slide down granite boulders. I wore out more than one pair of pants that way. I love the basalt boulders in my garden—even if they do make planting difficult sometimes—and the beautiful bluffs and cliffs around here. Every time I've been able to be around the hexagonal structure of basalt columns, I've loved seeing them and photographing them. So ever since I saw this cliff last year, I've wanted to make a painting of it. The colors and shapes of the columns have a natural beauty I can't resist, and the staining and moss and lichens on them make them even more beautiful to me. And that's beside my fascination with the way they originate within the earth and the processes that form them. I can't imagine I could ever get tired of seeing them, and they're one more thing about Oregon I love.