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Not since Covid have I have a solid week being homebound!  The icy storm that arrived January 24 was a tiny taste of that kind of an intense space of time to do work in my studio.  I am still in the exploratory stage of watercolor and in order to be able to take that medium outdoors and use it en plein air I must be able to complete a work in short order.  Watercolor is famous for this quality but I am not quite able to do that yet.  I tried to do a watercolor from t2o gouache studies.  They are both below along with some that were done from photos that I thought would translate well into watercolor.  It is a luxury to have the uninterrupted time to make such explorations.

Above is a watercolor that I made using the gouache study below that I did on New Years Day. I found the watercolor well suited to create the light coming from behind the tree trunks and to depict autumn leaves that has recently fallen onto the ground.

Waxahachie is a town that is only 20 minutes away from me and has always been a place that I can find many subjects to paint.  Some I have visited and painted many times.  The great thing about painting on site is that it is never the same, different times of the year and day, different seasons, the deterioration of old buildings as they age keep them fresh subjects to paint.  Behind the feed store they store bales of hay and the remnants of storage silos still remain.  

In Round Top there is a campus of a world famous Music Festival.  Some past owner of the property built a bridge and various structures to resemble the architecture of Europe.  It truly  is a step back into another world.  Above is my favorite bridge from this location

Above is the second attempt to create a watercolor version from a gouache study.  The Gouache study below was painted in my back yard on a very warm January day just before the storm.  The sun was picking its way through the brush, dancing with the leaves in the wind and I really felt that I was painting sunlight.  

Christmas this year was spent in Loretta New Mexico.  That's not far from Santa Fe.  The place we rented was an old adobe structure and was surrounded by decades of the current owners collections.  I loved the two chairs that looked like they were just waiting for spring to return and the dried foliage that surrounded them.  It's probably my favorite of this weeks endeavors.  Painting negatively has always been something that I found interesting. 

The last painting I did was from a text from my grand daughter with a photo of her beloved persian cat.  Here Birthday is Valentines day and the will be my gift to her.  

Learning something new can ba a challenge.  With nothing other than a few moments on CapCuts self help video I set out to create a simple example of painting apples.  Of course the first time was disaster so I had to paint it twice.  But all and all it was fun and  learned a lot by doing the exercise.  

   

What better to do on a 70 degree day  in Texas in January than to go outdoors in the backyard and paint the sunshine.  It was shining on the green leaves that  have come out because of the warm weather like the leaves in the spring.  Guache was the perfect medium for this opportunity as it is quick and easily set up and colorful!  

Christmas Day was kind of quiet and I had a chance to walk around the area where we were staying.  There was an Amtrak rail track near by and its sloping sides provided some shelter from the wind and an interesting landscape to paint.  Numerous trains came by and it required that I move down the hill a little to avoid  the winds from the train.  A beautiful storm was dropping some sump in the mountains.  This was a christmas present to myself!