Art Among Chaos

            Oh! My! Goodness-gracious-mercy-me! Look at the chaos that is my desk!

“How can you paint like that?” you ask.

I know, right!

I’m kind of used to it. I’ve been doing my five-minute paintings here. I pull out the little side desk and I’ve got a work space. The light is good. My paints are behind my keyboard. My spray bottle to activate my paints is here. My favorite brushes are laying on my desktop. My paint rag is here. All I have to do is get my water and I’m all set.

My biggest challenge in painting at my desk is this guy. Making sure he doesn’t land in my paint pan or on a wet painting when he jumps up on my desk. So far, I’ve been lucky.

There are probably things I could put away, like my wildflower book that used to belong to my dear, sweet, and greatly missed Aunt Brenda, since wildflower season is over. However, I find them useful. The tower of books holds my open sketchbook. I can glance over and see my latest ‘masterpiece’ or flip back to one I’ve already done for reference if I need to. 

When I started working on Christmas cards, I thought I’d paint at the table. But I could draw them out here at my desk. Once I had six drawn out, I decided to paint one. Funny how things just spin out of control, isn’t it? Since I already had paint on my brush I might just as well paint it on all the other cards before I switched colors. I’d find a place to set a wet card aside and work on another one. Once I used it every place I could, I’d switch color and do the same thing. They’re not all exactly the same because guess what? They’re handmade!

I goofed on one of my Grinch cards.

“What did you do?” I know you wanna know.

I had all my wet colors on the ornament and when I moved it to the table to dry, I moved it too vigorously, sloshing some of the red outside the circle. I tried to ‘erase’ it and it didn’t look too bad but there was still a light red tint on the paper.

I’ll make a shadow there, I thought and mixed up a light gray. My red was still wet and when I put the gray next to it, the red decided to dance with the gray and it wanted to lead.

Sigh.

Lesson learned. Not the color bleeding lesson, I already knew that one, but in my haste, I still make that mistake sometimes. The one where I moved it too fast. That’s the lesson I learned. We will call this one practice, cut our losses, and move on.

I told you I was done painting Christmas themes, didn’t I? This little snowman, with his little green pocket, was too cute not to try.

“Why didn’t you just paint it on a Christmas card?” you ask.

I thought of that. If I’d been painting them on cards all along, I’d be a lot further ahead on homemade Christmas-card making, that’s for sure! But if I did that, then I wouldn’t have it in my sketchbook. So, I painted him in my sketchbook first.

Then I saw this one and asked myself, do I really need to have a copy in my sketchbook? The answer is, if I need it in my sketchbook, I can always paint another one there.

I see that some of the other people who are making homemade cards are taking their painted cards and attaching them to another card to create a colored border. I’m afraid if I do that then my cards won’t fit in my envelopes — but I haven’t checked it out yet. And, quite frankly, I’m worried about getting enough cards painted to mail out in time without making more work for myself. On the other hand, I do want them to be nice for you. Thoughts?

I painted a polar bear this week, too.

And this crazy critter. It has two dates on the bottom because I started it on one and finished it on the other.

When working with paints, you can make them dry faster by using a hair dryer. In watercolor, the paint continues to blend as long as it’s still wet. Drying it with the hair dryer stops them like right now. It’s my experience, and strictly a matter of personal preference, but I think watercolors look better if I let them dry naturally. I don’t think it matters with acrylic paints, and I've never tried it with oil paints.

I can’t tell you how much I love watercolors! I have so many things rattling around inside my head that I want to paint, it’s a virtual tsunami in there! I’ve taken so many nice photos over the years that I’d really like to try to paint a few of them. Maybe I won’t take any more commissions for the winter and just paint. That’s a thought. What’ll happen if I’m offered a commission remains to be seen.

Messing up a watercolor card this week isn’t the only thing I messed up.

“What did you do‽” I know you want to know. Hearing about my SNAFUs makes you feel better about your own, doesn’t it?

My best old friend in West Virginia is a very talented craft lady in her own right. One of the things I admire about people like her is they turn trash into treasures. Trish uses large pill bottles and other containers in her crafts and because I love her, I save mine, as well as some from the Kipps, and send them to her.

“I’m getting ready to send you a box. Is there anything special I can add?” I asked.

“Something lemony or cinnamony would be great,” she replied.

Lemon Meltaways and Cinnamon Bread immediately come to mind. I could do both, but as I’ve already stated, I’m worried about time. Miss Rosie loves lemon, methinks, so I’ll make a double batch and give her some, too. 

One of the ingredients in the cookies is lemon zest. Most people just zest a lemon but I don’t keep lemons on hand, ergo, no lemon zest. I’d already used all my dried zest and I was out of lemon extract. That left me with just one option. Lemon juice. To get the right amount of flavor while using lemon juice increases the liquid in the recipe quite a bit. I decided to reduce the juice into a concentrate so I didn’t add so much extra liquid into my recipe.

“Don’t boil it,” my AI buddy said. “It’ll change the flavor.”

I didn’t want that to happen so I had it on low heat. Something that should’ve taken twenty to thirty minutes took three times that long. Even making a concentrate, my batter still looked too thin. I’ll try it anyway, I thought. The cookies spread way, way too much and when I tasted them, they tasted bitter to me. As careful as I was, as low a heat as I used, it still changed the flavor.

I took the bowl of batter out to the weeds and dumped it. Raini went with me and was curious as to what I was doing. I held the now empty bowl down for her to sniff. Surprise of surprises! She liked it! And licked the bowl and spatula clean. (No worries. I add bleach to my dish water.)

Now I was stuck. It would take days to get lemon zest here from Amazon. Stores around here don’t carry it. What to do, what to do....

Miss Rosie!

“Miss Rosie, do you have any lemon zest?” I called and asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I just saw it in the cabinet yesterday.”

“I’ll trade you some for the lemon cookies you like,” I offered.

She didn’t even hesitate. “Deal! And I get the better end of that deal!”

This time when I made the cookies, they came out de-lish!

I was thinking about how to ship them to Trish when I remembered something from when she was here visiting. We were packing up some recyclables for her to take back with her and as I stood there watching, she was putting small jars in big jars.

You guys know me by now. It’s the obvious stuff that sometimes escapes me. “How clever!” I admired.

I can still hear the sound of her warm, bubbly laughter as she said. “There’s no use to take an empty container. Besides, it saves room.”

One of the things she liked when she was here was my coffee jars. I always keep a few empties on hand. I was proud of myself for thinking of it, even if Trish did think of it first. I got a couple from the shelf and would’ve been happy if the jars held a dozen cookies, but I ended up with twenty cookies in each jar!

We had snow this week. Here Raini stands in the yard, letting the gently falling snow land on her face. She doesn’t mind the snow and still wants me to throw the ball out in the yard for her when I go out to fill the birdfeeders, but I don’t like the snow she tracks in or what falls off her ball when she drops it on my kitchen floor.

Speaking of birds...

I’m still getting several species of birds at my feeders that should’ve migrated weeks ago.

Two Starlings puffed up against the cold have been regular visitors to my feeders.

“If the conditions are mild and they can find enough food, they may not migrate,” AI tells me.

I thought there were three more Starlings on another feeder but looking at it on my computer I can see they’re not Starlings. These are Grackles.

I even had a Red-winged Blackbird at my feeder. These guys should’ve all been gone by October. 

Do you remember The Rest of the Story by Paul Harvey? It was a regular feature in my home when we were growing up and I always loved his “rest of the story” stories.

Recently one came up on my Facebook feed.

To paraphrase, Paul talked about a kid who went to school dressed nicely every day (I can’t remember if he said he wore a tie), always sat in the front row, got straight A’s, and was an avid reader. The other kids made fun of him and beat him up on a regular basis. He wouldn’t fight back. To make things worse, he had a girl’s name. He admired the heroes in the Westerns on the big screen, never knowing he’d become one. Marion Morrison, aka, John Wayne.

I played the short reel for Mike and when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it again.

There’s an internet archive site where you can listen to more than 600 of Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story programs but the only one listed for John Wayne was a different one. 

We went shopping one day so I’ve got road pictures for you.

Duck butts.

We ran into a snow squall on the way home...

Then drove out of it as if it never existed.

I thought the image of the Twin Towers for the eleven was interesting. Maybe y’all have seen it before but this is the first time I’ve seen it, or maybe it’s just the first time I’ve taken note of it.

And that’s it.

That was my week.