Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: Practice

I haven’t shown you my practice watercolors in almost three weeks. Since nothing very exciting happened this week, how about I catch you up on my sketchbook?

Drawing isn’t so much my goal as painting, so when I can use patterns to transfer my images, I do. It saves time and my proportions are always right. In my sketchbook I always free-draw. I mean, practicing is what it’s all about, right?

I’m not proud of the stone house, but I always give you the good, bad and ugly! Besides, it’s practice.

I’m not good with trees so I try to practice them.

Especially with Christmas coming!

This one is supposed to be the Aurora Borealis. The lady I was following in the tutorial was using acrylic paint and I’d already done the first step, which was to put the background in, before I thought that I might have to do it different because I was using watercolors. As a result, my colors are not vibrant. For the window frame I used a black sharpie. It bled through my paper to the other side.

I’m thinking about painting Christmas cards this year. Then I wonder why. People throw cards away — as is their right to do with any gift they receive, even the gift of a Peggy painted watercolor Christmas card. Nonetheless, painting Christmas themes is fun and I couldn’t stop! The dates are on the bottom and I painted three on this day!

Remember this past summer, I found two big bags of glitter for like fifty or seventy-five cents each? I got blue and gold. I didn’t even know why I was buying them. Now I know. The only thing is, now there’s glitter EVERYWHERE!

I was practicing with a snowflake stamp on this one.

“Peg, you need more practice with that!” you say.

I know, right!

I also need to keep my sleeve out of the brown paint. I didn’t stress. I cleaned it up a little and called it practice.

I didn’t get my Charlie Brown tree centered on the page very well and the blue blanket looks like water, but did I mention this is only practice?

To give you an idea of size, my sketchbook is 5.5 inches square. It holds forty-four pages and I somehow missed the very first page. There’s only one page left in the back then it’s full! It’s a good thing I bought two of them or I’d have to go back to the old book I’d started out using for a sketchbook back in February.

I finished the Nightmare box.

It has a green background because that’s his wife’s favorite color. The Nightmare Before Christmas is her favorite movie and Halloween is her favorite holiday.

I used glass paint to protect and shine. That’s one of those things you either like or hate and the client likes it.

I’ve started work on the second box for this client. This one I call Papa’s Box because it’s a memorial box with his grandfather’s picture as well as his birth and death dates on it. I’ll wait until it’s done to show you.

We had to make a couple of trips to Tunkhannock this week. It couldn’t be helped. One trip was for a dental appointment for me, then two days later, Bondi had a vet appointment.

We saw this old truck in a parking lot the first trip over.

The second trip we see the same truck waiting to pull out of a side road.

This time of year you can see all of the bright orange berries of the Bittersweet draped all over the naked trees. I know it’s invasive but I still love it.

I know better than to try and capture a hawk in flight. I really do know that the chances are slim to none at all that I’ll get a good shot.

It doesn’t stop me from trying.

Cows making a bed on their hay.

This lady had her scarf slung across her handbag and drug it the whole way down the sidewalk. I can only imagine what a mess of germs and no telling what all else it’ll have on it when she gets where she’s going.

We took the golf cart to get the mail and generally we take the dogs with us. On this day, this trip, Mike didn’t pull into Charlie’s driveway like he usually does. Instead, he pulled across the yard to the front door. Raini got off the cart with me, like she usually does, and I had to laugh as she retreated to the spot where the cart would normally be.

There she waited for me. I gave Charlie his mail, called Raini, and she was a little hesitant to come as Charlie was standing in the doorway between us, but as she lost sight of me behind a tree, she got her brave on and came running.

Tiger, as seen through the glass of the door divider, sitting under the light on Mike’s desk.

I see it, you get to see it, too.

I don’t get up early if I don’t have to. But I was up early enough to catch a sunrise this week. By the time I got my camera and got outside, the colors were already starting to fade.