Miss Rosie Says

           I spent my week painting. But I bet that comes as no surprise to you. Other than showing you what I’ve been painting, it’s been a rather mundane week.

          “I bet you have pictures you could show us,” Miss Rosie says.

          And she’s right. Sitting right here in my computer is a file with over two hundred road pictures I took on our trip last October. Two hundred would fill a lot of pages!

          But first let’s start with what I painted.

          When I painted Christmas cards, I had a hard time deciding what to paint for Miss Rosie. I know she likes chickens — and I did find some Christmas-themed chickens. I know she likes cats. I painted a cat for her for Halloween. I know also that she likes birds. When I saw this image of cardinals on a mailbox, I decided that would be the one I’d paint for her.

          This image is one that I’m legally allowed to reproduce, so no worries about copyright infringement there. Just thought I’d say that outright since you know that’s been on my mind

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          My mentor, California Susan, follows my painting career. I always show her what I’m working on and I showed her the cardinals.

          She fell in love with them.

          Since Miss Rosie had no idea what I was painting for her, she wouldn’t know I’d given her intended card away.

          Unless I told her.

          Which, I did.

          “Since she’s going to send it to someone, she needs to have it in time to mail it.” Miss Rosie understood. “You can paint me another one before Christmas.”

          In my mind’s eye, an image similar to this one came to me. “Why paint the same thing twice when I could paint something else?” I asked her.

          “Whatever you wanna do,” she said.

          I looked at the image and decided I really did like this one better.

          I got so far as to transfer the image to my watercolor paper, but hadn’t yet picked up a brush, when I remembered something.

          “What’s that?” you wanna know.

          I remembered, two years ago, during the church’s yard sale, Rosie and Lamar had donated their old picnic basket. Now, I won’t say the basket was trash, but it was definitely well loved.

          “We took the girls on a lot of picnics with this thing,” Lamar said as he was packing his leftover donated items to take home. “I’m going to burn it,” Lamar said.

          Well! Me being me, couldn’t have that!

          “NO! I’ll take it. Maybe paint something on the lid for Miss Rosie!” I said.

          Like I said, that was two years ago. You can’t get in a hurry about this stuff.

          Out in the cat room, way up on a tippy-top shelf was where the basket had been living for the past two years. I got it down and took it into the house.

          Prying the lid from the basket was a challenge! The hinges had been nailed on with little nails and the tips had been bent over. I had a fleeting notion of leaving the hinges attached because I was afraid I’d destroy the lid in the process of removing them but ultimately decided I wanted them off. If it was ruined, I’d worry about that later. First, I’d have to get them off. I stuck a screwdriver between the hinge and lid and pried. Surprise! They popped out with little to no damage on the top.

          I took it to the sink and washed it. It was while I was doing this that I noticed Rosie’s mother’s name had been written on the underside of the lid.

          “Can you send me a picture of it?” their daughter Jenn asked when I told her about it.

          I took a picture of Peewee and sent it to her.

          I didn’t know if I wanted to paint it landscape or portrait. I had a thought to use the elastic meant to hold your silverware as a way to hang it, but it fell apart when I pulled on it.

That’s okay. It made the decision for me. I painted it portrait.

“I have to learn to use acrylics all over again,” I told my handsome mountain man. 

It appears Tiger doesn’t care if his water is flavored with watercolors or acrylic paints.

If Miss Rosie wants me to paint WINTER’S WATCHERS on the top, I will. But if I put it on and she doesn’t want it, I won’t be able to take it off without sanding it.

I only have one commission on my plate and it’s not due for a couple of months. The other three never came through and I’m not going to sit around and wait for them, I’m going to paint.

          I feel like I was mildly successful at painting Andrew’s portrait, which I showed you last time. I wanted to try another real person portrait.

          After two days of painting, this is where I’m at. I know I need to deepen my shadows but I don’t exactly know what colors to use, plus it scares me.

          I put it to my peeps on my FB watercolor page.

          “If you’re looking for accuracy,” one of the gals said, “you’ll have to be bold with your shading.”

          “That scares me,” I told her.

          She offered this bit of advice. “I was talking to a professional artist friend of mine and told him I was afraid of ruining them by going too dark. He told me, ‘Oh, you’re going to ruin some.’ So, go ahead and take that pressure off of yourself and be bold! It will make a huge difference if you’re looking to achieve something realistic. You have an amazing start here!”

          I’m not going for realistic, just recognizable.

          Besides being scared of messing it up, I told them, “I’m thinking about a wash of Ivory Black.” It’s not as strong as Mars Black and I was hoping it would let the underpainting show through and wouldn’t completely cover it like the other black would.

          “Not black,” was the overwhelming response. “Use a complementary color like purple or Vandyke Brown.”

I was super surprised when I saw this comment. “Not black, maybe Burnt Sienna with a touch of red and blue.”

          Not because of the colors suggested but because of who suggested it. Rachel Parker Varner. She’s sorta famous in the watercolor world as a watercolor artist and teacher. She has a YouTube channel with over 58,000 subscribers. Rachel has many free tutorials but also has a Patreon page for deeper instruction. She’s sold paintings all over the world — and she took the time to give me advice! How cool is that!

          We had snow, which I’m sure doesn’t surprise you, either.

          I was running low on dog food so we made a run to the store.

          I took pictures for you.

          Our pretty little creek, both sides of the bridge.

          Colorful graffiti.

          Fire?

          Ladies’ day out? 

          Ice fisher.

          The weather warmed and we got hours and hours of rain. The snow all melted.

          Two birds sat under the awning, out of the rain, for the longest time.

          I decorated for Christmas. I hung up my Christmas cards and plugged in my tree. Done!

          Speaking of done...

This letter blog would be done because that’s all I had to talk about this week, if I didn’t have Miss Rosie’s suggestions to dig out a few of our vacation pictures for you.

          Let’s end with a sunset picture from that trip.

          Done!