A Place of Her Own

My neighbor's outbuildings have always fascinated me.  Each one is used for something special.  One is a potting shed with a storage area for handmade holiday decorations, a garage for the car, woodshed (filled with wood for cozy fires in winter), a storage shed and my favorite, her workshop.  Even though the outside of the workshop is filled with flowering trees, vines, and blooms galore; inside the workshop are her well worn tools for the hard, but rewarding work of gardening, woodworking, carving and repairing.

Free to Be

My neighbors yard is filled with flowers.  One whole flower bed is filled with Tiger Lilies that have been allowed to self seed and the bees and hummingbirds are benefiting.  I am so lucky to be able to paint the beauty that is right next door.  

On Thursday Give Thanks

My sunflowers have flowered and the heads are starting to have sunflower seeds. The sunflowers have  bloomed just in time for me to create this oil painting for the Daily Paint Works Sunflower(s) Challenge.  

On Sunday Smell the Roses

This painting is entered into the DPW Challenge on Composition.  It was fun to use two (I have a whole collection of women's needlecraft) of my tea towels and the red climbing roses, from the arbor outside the studio, in this still life set-up.  

NASTURTIUM

These nasturtium were a riot of color in my window box and it was an exciting challenge to capture their colors in paint for this still life.  Not only were these colorful flowers beautiful cascading down the window box, but as an added bonus, the flowers and leaves are edible. 

Baby Rubber Duckie Dancing

After painting this little (5" x 7") gouache painting I decided to donate it to the Oklahoma Tornado Fundraiser auction through my sales site at www.dailypaintworks.com.  100% of all of the proceeds from the sale of this painting will go to the Red Cross to help the victims of the Oklahoma Tornado.  

Diva Duckie

This weeks Daily Paint Works challenge was to paint a composition that was mostly warm or mostly cool with the remaining portion the opposite of the majority temperature.  This sounded very interesting to me and I started gathering my still life items to paint for the challenge.  As you can see I have created a mostly warm painting with a smaller portion of cool temperature pigments completing the painting.

Diamonds may be a girls best friend but it appears that rubber duckies (at least Diva Duckies) prefer pearls.