Tagged by the Queen of the World

I didn't know about tagging until I was tagged by Maggie Stiefvater. So I felt it necessary to play along. (Yes, I said that .. felt necessary, it sounds/sounded like so much fun.)

I'm tagging along and you tagees can tell us seven things about you that are a habit, unusual or that no one knows. Then you tag seven other bloggers, friends?, by posting to one of their blogs and pointing them to your blog as I am doing to these seven friends.

So, here goes, as Maggie said, first things first. Seven things most people don't know or care about me, habits, etc.

1. I wanted to be a truck driver when I grew up. My brother drove an 18 wheeler for a while and I thought that would be so great. (I have changed my mind about that.)

2. I'm a procrastinator. Not everyone knows that. I just say that I work better under pressure, and try to prove it. Not as easy now that my memory is so bad, I forget to read my reminders. Arghhhh. I'm also wishy washy and can never make up my mind. I've done this post several times already. :) And I don't type 70 words a minute anymore like some people.

3. I hate to clean house. Anyone that visits my house knows that. We usually clean if we know company is coming, so let us know when you are going to drop in.

4. I really like to play golf. I'm not good at it but I just like to try. My mom used to watch golf and I thought it was the most boring, silliest thing. I like to have golf on TV when I paint. I don't really watch, but it is calming and the courses are beautiful to look at. I don't enjoy playing golf as much at the fancy courses where they make you play with strangers and charge an arm and a leg. I'm talking friendly small town courses. We have played all over Canada and the U.S. We love to travel and only have Alaska and Wisconsin to visit to see all 50 states.

5. My roommate, Gen, from my first real job, working for Continental Airlines, is still a great friend and Gene and her husband, Charlie, are great friends, too. Over forty years of friendship. We introduced her to golf, too, but haven't convinced Charlie. He drives for Gene, though, and we still have a great time. A cold beer keeps the guys interested.

6. My daughter, Joanna, got me started on a Mac computer, a hand me down and the tradition has carried on from the 80s. I'm addicted and still using her hand me down computer. She has two blogs, but doesn't have comments, so she won't play along. You can see her website and check out her blogs. Great photos and Longhorn Baseball news.

7. I love blue glass, pottery (I have a huge cup collection), U T Baseball, wine, margaritas, my kids (Oops margaritas over kids ..... don't go by the order of the list, kids! Seven is just not enough. I can't choose.)

Here are seven friends (still, I hope) that I am tagging.... I will go to their blogs and make a comment and tell them to check back here! Heh, heh.

1. Chuck Law - Chuck is a wonderful artist. He paints beautiful realistic paintings with a contemporary viewpoint, he says. Ah, he also likes crows and dead jellyfish, etc.

2. Leslie Hawes - The fairy lady. Leslie does beautiful colored pencil drawings of fairies and many other interesting things. She loves to write and study words and has a new blog for herself and one for her dog. Leslie lived here in Bastrop and we had great fun together. She is now in Arizona and we have visited there once.

3. Karen Margulis - A wonderful pastelist. She is fairly new at pastels, but puts daily study and practice to great use and is doing plein air. Great colors and design.

4. Marie Dom - A sketcher I "met" on wet canvas. Beautiful, descriptive sketches and stories to go with them.

5. Karen Winters - A watercolor artist. I discovered her blog by chance and just love to go out on her visual treks.

6. Lesly Finn - What a great artist in New Zealand. Abstracts and realistic paintings and drawings. She does ArtBlogs4U, a blog with listings of many artists that blog with no compensation other than helping us artists spread the word.

7. Susan Carlin - a wonderful portrait artist in oils and pastels. I met Susan through the Austin Pastel Society and we have had great fun, too. She is really a good teacher.

If any of you regular readers of my blog feel slighted - remember, I could only pick 7 - and want to join in, feel free, just link back here for the "rules" and tag away.

Sketch and Rain Photos

My sketch for the Scavenger hunt was done in about 15 minutes with a ZIG Millennium pen in my generic sketchbook.



The#10 backpack is an old one Gene uses for his bicycle stuff when we travel. # 9 The trash bin is a wooden box he built for me to match my cabinets. It is stressed blue wood. You can sit on it like a bench and when you open it it has two plastic trash bins, one for recycle and one for trash. Pretty nifty.





It tried to rain today. Rain showers were very spotty. We got about a 5 minute rain in the sunshine. It doesn't show very well in the photos, but looked so pretty with the silver rain drops falling and glittering in the sunshine. Gene took the photos while I was making tortillas. I burned two, I haven't been making them as often and couldn't get in the rhythm. How soon we forget.

"How To" by Maggie Stiefvater

Full of Hot Air
Pastel on Pastelbord, 12 x 12 inches

You all know that I read Maggie's blog to have a smile at the end of my day. But.... she is a great artist and shares her ideas and discoveries with all of us. If you don't read her blog on a daily basis, you might check it out. She does a recipe/food instruction page , The Deadly Spatula, as well. She is a member of wetcanvas.com and shares info there. There is a very good thread going on at the moment in how she did this painting in colored pencil. Amazing stuff. I might even try it, a quick way to use colored pencil. Hoorah! That is my complaint about colored pencil, to get your paper filled in and have great colors you have to do umpteen layers. Maggie's method helps. She also does it on Pastelbord (we have talked about Pastelbord before, I used it in the one in this post, Full of Hot Air, and I'm using it in my current painting.) and frames without glass, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty cool.

The wetcanvas.com site is a little complicated, but in the thread you go forward and back using the arrows and numbers at the upper right and scoot around by clicking on links and using the search bar. Have fun. It is well worth the effort, believe me. Be careful, it is addictive, like blogging instead of painting. Hmmm.

Exhibit at Northwest Hills Gallery

I did not get a rejection call, so my paintings are at the Northwest Hills Gallery at the Northwest Hills United Methodist Church. The show is, All Creatures Great and Small. Animals of course. I submitted these three:

Young Alpaca
8 x 10 inches, pastel


Boys and Their Toys
16 x 20 inches, pastel

The Crossing
16 x 20 inches, Pastel

The entries were juried by Jan Sewall. There are at lest 60 pieces of artwork in assorted media and different techniques. Beautiful to see. If you get a chance, please stop by. All artwork is at its best, live and in person.

The opening reception is Sunday, May 27, 2007, from 12:15 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. The public is invited. The exhibit is open from today and will be on display through Sunday, June 24.

Hours at the Church Gallery are
Monday - Friday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, Closed
Sunday, 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
7050 Village Center Drive
Austin, Texas 78731

To get there, turn on Far West Boulevard from Mopac and go to the second light. Turn left and the church is immediately on your right. The gallery is to the left of the main office.

Sadly, I won't be at the reception we will be on our way to Christy's graduation! Congratulations, Christy. She is a senior in High School in Kentucky. Yaaaahoooooo!!

Magdalena from the West, Pastel Painting WIP

Work in Progress

I'm trying to prepare for my show in New Mexico in July. I started a painting of Highway 60 coming into Magdalena from the west. You get a nice view from 10 miles out until you get close to town. The mountains in the background and the straight as an arrow highway. Very pretty in the evening with the rain passing by and a little sunshine on things. I hope to develop some more exciting light than appears in the photo.

It is on Ampersand Pastelbord in olive green, 16 x 20 inches. (While looking for the link to Ampersand, I discovered their 10th annual exhibit, check it out.) I attempted a watercolor under painting. It didn't work too well, the water just runs off of the pastelbord as I had it straight up and down on my easel instead of being flat on the table. Some of the color stayed, but not like it would have if I had laid it flat. I work with my easel upright, even tilted a tinge toward me to help the loose pastel to fall off in a tray instead of staying on the painting.

I started with some of the basic colors and work down after that. In landscapes you work from top down and back to front. That helps to get aerial perspective and keep the front clean and sharp. I would rather have done this plein air, but not possible, so am using a photo I took last summer.

• This is the beginning, you can see a little of the watercolor and my basic lines to show where the mountains, road, etc., are in the painting.

• I developed the sky and clouds. I will refine that some, I'm not happy with the upside down V right in the middle.

The mountains are coming along OK. The color is difficult as the trees are pines, the rocks are sort of green but will be more reddish gold in the sun. The dirt is a little gray,brown. I tweaked the photo a little to get more contrast, we shall see if I leave it that way. :)

• Here is the set up with the photo. I put a grid on it on the computer so that I can get a decent placement on the "canvas" - board.

• Here are my pastels, or part of them. I could just sit and look at the pastels, they are so colorful. You can see the mess in my studio .. oh well, that is the way I am.

I didn't sketch today, but need to go comment on the Scavenger Hunt as I am the host for #39. I also need to post about the show in Austin that I delivered paintings to yesterday. Back to do that later.....

Photos from Golf Today

We went to walk nine holes. It was a beautiful day and we played decently. The course is pretty with all the green.


This is looking back across number 8. You hit over the water on your second or third shot.


This is Gene doing his favorite thing, looking for balls in the water. He found a few today, including his!.


This was the other evening near the golf course, too. You can see why we like to play golf. This is perfect weather here. Not too humid and about 85 in the daytime and 65 at night so you can open the house. In another couple of weeks, the house has to stay closed at it stays above 75 and is humid. Yuck. But for the moment, it is just lovely.

Sketches Spam & Recycle, Photos Austin

It was off to Austin today to take three paintings to the Northwest Hills Gallery at the Northwest Hills United Methodist Church. The show is, All Creatures Great and Small. Animals of course. I submitted Young Alpaca, The Crossing and Boys and Their Toys. They were supposed to call today if one's work is not accepted, so it looks positive as there was no phone call. The entries were juried by Jan Sewall. Hopefully they were accepted.

On the sketching side I came back home and pulled out the ZIG Millennium pen and the Canson small sketchbook.


I worked on the challenge, to sketch a scene from the day before with figures. I asked Gene to check his journal for what we did and we had visited the recycle center, so that was my choice. Not great, but from memory. I don't imagine it is very close to how it looks. :)



I also worked on # 6, a rolling pin - this is an old one that I got at a garage sale and have used once. It just sits on an old dish rack with the chopping boards. #7, a food can, - Spam, Lite .. is that a misnomer or what?, #8 a glass bottle - a blue one with a cork that sits in my window and #9, a serving bowl - a glass one that I use for salad usually. That is, when I cook, don't do much of that these days .. hard to cook for two.



Yesterday we were in Austin to go to the doctor for a checkup and to do the recycling of cans, bottles, etc. We took some batteries to Wolf Camera on 6th Street and Congress, where I took this photo with the Capitol in the background.

This photo is of the work on the new toll road on the way home at HWY 71 and near the airport and Onion Creek. The clouds in it are just beautiful.

Wednesday 5/9 I fixed the link to the photo and added this post to the exhibit category. Thanks, Joanna.

Scavenger Sketches, Wagon, Lamp, Baseball note

I sketched last night for the Hunt. In the Canson sketchbook with the ZIG Millennium pen. From the list I chose:


For #2, Toy with wheels - Gene's wagon he got for Christmas. It is about 12 or 14 inches long. Bright red. Very off kilter in my sketch. As you may remember, I sketch with a pen trying to get it down the first time and I didn't "look" too well this time. Shucks. 15 minutes.



#3, Stack of books - sketchbooks on my PowerBook, # basket - litle red, blue and natural basket and #5 table lamp. The basket is off, I could actually see further down into the basket, so the whole sketch looks wonky. Oh well. I did at least sketch, which is more important as I am hosting the Scavenger Hunt this week. 20 min.

Baseball Note:
The Longhorns lost 5 - 4 to Missouri. Must be the Sunday hex. Read about it here on Joanna's page and here on the official page. Joanna is also writing for Bevo Sports, so check that out, too. I took some photos, but so many that I haven't sorted any out to publish. Took an hour just to look at them. :(