Weekend sketching

We had a wedding to attend this last weekend and I like to make cards to go along with my hand-made gift.  So I started with a watercolour on some cardstock, inspired by these watercolours that I had painted last year.  And then I just kept making a few more, playing with different colours and shapes.  Sometimes it's nice to work on something small, working through a simple concept to see where it goes.  Plus it's nice to have a few cards ready to go when the occasion arises.

Birch

Another watercolour in the works inspired by my time away...

Watercolour Wildlife

As you may have noticed, I've been away for the past 5 days in Princeton BC (about 3.5 hours away from Vancouver) at a resort camp that we attend every June for a staff conference for Dean's work.  The climate in the interior of BC is really different than that of Vancouver-  I live in a mild and temperate rainforest climate, while Princeton is much dryer with much more extremes in climate- ie. cold in winter and hot and dry in summer.  There are so many birds and wildlife that we got to see while we were there; besides all the sparrows, birds, and eagles, we spotted (and photographed) a baby fawn close up, lots of deer, a marmot, and a little striped chipmunk.  Someone in our group even saw a 'cinnamon' coloured bear right by where we were hiking that day- yikes!
All the wildlife and of course the patches of birch and aspen trees were pretty inspiring, so, when it got cold and a little wet about the 4th day in, I spent some time indoors with Sasha (he's got such a cute and goofy smile on his face) doing some watercolour painting together. Here's a couple of bird paintings I managed to finish. Hopefully I'll have time to finish a few more that I started so I can share them with you here. To see more work from this little mini-watercolour series see here.

Work in Progress

I don't have a lot of time or space to work on really large paintings these days like I used to when I used to rent 2 small studio spaces- one for my clay work and one for painting.  Since I needed more space for clay work last year I pulled everything into one studio with high hopes of being able to pull out some paintings a few times a month to work on it. Unfortunately I haven't made a practice of doing this and frankly- clay dust and painting don't really work together really well.  So I've started to do some painting at home on my desk. Just some small watercolours.  Just for my own sake, when I can fit it in, sometimes in between school pick ups or when the boys are in bed for the night.  Sure beats watching TV or doing laundry:)  It's got me all inspired to do more.  The photograph of the 'look-out tower' was taken recently on a visit to my sister's in Nanaimo.  I love that in paint you can re-arrange and change things to suit your composition or painting.  Usually I take a photograph of something I might use in a painting.  Other times I paint purely from memory of a place or a moment in time.