WELLNESS

Well, it's migraine season again for me.  So I'll be off painting for a while.  Just trying to get myself well.  Seems like this happens every spring but it's early for spring here with cold weather and snow flurries still happening daily.  So...I'll return when I'm feeling better for more than 1/2 day at a time.

MERMAID SONG

Mermaid, full length, not just the tail.






I used to love the Shel Silverstein mermaid song:

When I was a lad in a fishing town, an old man said to me
You can spend your life, your whole damn life, fishing in the sea
You can search the world for pretty girls til your eyes are weak and dim
But don't go swimming with a mermaid, son, if you don't know how to swim.

Cause her hair is green as seaweed
and her skin is smooth and pale
and her face it is a work of art
and you'll love that girl with all your heart
but you'll only love the upper part
you're not gonna like the tail. 

7 x 10 ROUGH SERIES

A white pelican from Florida.  
Backlit and shadowed.

SWIMMING ALONG

This one is on Stonehenge Aqua hotpress paper with watercolor.  Added a bit of silver and gold acrylic pen marks to make the scales and outline some areas.  The words are in silver acrylic pen. 


Time to get back to the 7 x 10 Series of birds...

RAIN OFF A MERMAID'S BACK?

With the words added.  Hard to see in the photo, but it says

Just keep swimming!


(I softened out the tailfin.)  This is on Stonehenge Aqua hotpress paper (I'm liking it more, the more I use it.)


And we can use that tagline now because we are having rain rain rain and more rain.  The Ohio River is at flood stage and overflowing streets in Newport and Bellevue on the Kentucky side.  

And more rain predicted this week.


So, keep your head above water (unless you're a mermaid) and more mermaids and birds to come...

UNDER THE SEA

Just another mermaid.

STONEHENGE AQUA HOTPRESS PAPER: MERMAID IN DISGUISE

Walking on the beach on Anna Maria Island, I saw this slender girl in white with bright red (mermaid) hair.  Had to snap a photo and then try to capture her.  Her shadow shows some of her "real" shape she's hiding by walking among us.

A real mermaid?  Or just my imagination?  

7 x 10 ROUGH SERIES: HUMMINGBIRD

Back to the 7 x 10 Rough series of birds in between other things. 

I enjoy switching back and forth between the rough paper and the hotpress paper.

This little hummingbird is from a photo Sweetie took from his trip to Costa Rica last year.

FLUID ACRYLICS ON GESSO BOARD: MERMAID

I thought I'd paint a mermaid on the gessobord I have in my art stash.  I like some things about it, but not all things about it so...

although I was going to glue the scrabble tiles down on the mermaid painting and call it finished, it just wasn't good enough for me to use the only scrabble tiles I have so...

it doesn't look like this because the tiles are just sitting on top of the painting.





Instead, it looks like the last painting and I'll do another on gessobord (I have 2 larger ones I'll try), and hope to be more pleased with the outcome.

The finished piece has some good sections (the blue looks fishy because I made a scale pattern in it: while the paint was wet, I dabbed with a textured paper towel and got the scaled look and the merge from golden to blue created a nice green at the base of the tail before the fins).


The writing was done with a gold acrylic marker.


I'll let this sit for a while and if I really don't like it, I can cover over it because it's gessobord for use with oils and acrylics.  I have a lot of fluid acrylics and regular acrylics I hardly ever use but this seemed like a good time to try them out - I obviously need more practice with the medium.

I should be outside because we are having a heat wave here after our Polar Vortex.

MANGROVES IN AUTUMN COLORS

The bright colors of the mangrove leaves are always interesting and tempting to paint.  I started this one on my hotpress to get the colors to bleed and run and mingle.  

(Not sure why the background looks violet because it's not - it's white paper:  Stonehenge Aqua hotpress paper, 10 x 14, 140#.)