Hummingbird Woman

 

Melanie Rivers, Dance of the Dragonfly

In 2024 I did a few classes of the Art Soul Gathering. One of them was by Melanie Rivers, an Indigenous mixed media artist from the Squamish First Nation in Vancouver, Canada. Many of you probably know her and her beautiful art. This class was called "Dance of the Dragonfly" where she showed how to create the portrait you can see above.

She used this photo as a reference:

I tried to create a textured background on a wood panel, using some paper package filling and also scribbled in the gesso. Then I traced the woman and painted with acrylic paints. I'm not super happy with it, but also not unhappy. Kind of neutral. Since I didn't have a dragonfly image and I really like hummingbirds, I decided to use the image of a hummingbird that I had found in a magazine. Instead of "Dance of the Dragonfly" I called her "Hummingbird Woman".

This is for Nicole's Friday Face Off.

I apologize for not commenting very much on your blogs at the moment. I got another big order that I hope to wrap up this weekend. Hopefully, after that I will have more time.

Those Crooked Trees!

 

Hopefully you are not tired of all those beautiful, crooked, dead trees in the Southwest, because I'm not done yet! Especially Arches National Park has an abundance of these trees. For this post I've chosen some of my favorites, shot over two days in this beautiful and exciting park.

Some trees only have parts of their trunk left.

Others frame the view over the desert landscape.

A thin twisted trunk is all that is left, but it makes such a stunning statement.

Some reach towards a dramatic sky.

Buddha's hand or Medusa's head?

Even as a dead tree it still has a task, framing this rock formation.

You can study the twists and turns right in front of you, and look at that beautiful bark.

Skyline Arch wouldn't be half as interesting without all this twisted, gnarly wood.

I always find it interesting and fascinating how the Juniper trees are dead on one side and carry berries on the other.

The following tree was (and still is) my favorite one. When I looked back on one of our hikes - I think it was the Windows Loop - I was immediately taken by the shape of the tree and how it framed the rock formation that was then carrying on the line with that dramatic sky behind it. Everything was in line! (You know how we photographers also look for lines.)

A few years ago I took a short class with Melanie Rivers, a Canadian artist I like very much. The main subject was trees and one of the challenges was tree woman. I never really liked what I created, but over the years she grew on me. She is for Nicole's Friday Face Off.

By the way, have you read about Nicole's new challenge "Sunday in the Art Room" (SITAR)? You'll find me there this Sunday. Until then, my friends.

Touch of the Moon

 

A week ago I started watching Art Soul Gathering, a free online art retreat hosted by Ida Andersen Lang. The instructor of the first lesson was Melanie Rivers, an artist I like very much, who was the reason that I signed up for this. We were painting a face forward portrait with the moon in the background by using acrylic paints with a limited color palette. Since I didn't have the exact colors Melanie used, I chose Payne's Gray, Titanium White, Prism Violet and Alizarin Crimson Hue. I have never worked much with violet, but since I like the combination of purple and red I thought these might be good colors.

I was glad that the woman had her eyes closed - it was hard enough for me to paint the face without worrying about the eyes. Very soon I realized that violet was not the best choice I made, so I used more of the Alizarin Crimson that I mixed with the Payne's Gray and also the Titanium White. Violet got on the moon to show that actually there was only a sliver of the moon. Since you can't really see this I decided to draw black swirls in the moon - I do like swirls and they often turn up in my art making. Melanie used filbert brushes which I did at first as well, but I prefer painting with round brushes. I didn't get quite the result with the filbert and therefore after a while changed to a round brush. Do you prefer a brush over another?

This is for Nicole's Friday Face Off. This has really encouraged me to try paint more faces.

Tree Woman

 

On the fifth and last day of her "Between Roots and Rings" challenge, Melanie Rivers asked us to draw a 'tree woman'. She gave us a reference photo of an old woman she found on Pinterest, and of course I cannot find that anymore. However, I can tell you that the graphite drawing of my woman doesn't bear any similarity to the woman in the photo. I was struggling with this and found it hard to draw an old woman.

I'm linking this to Nicole's Friday Face Off.

And just because, I'm sharing another face, one that is so much lovelier - sweet Otis. The photo was taken by the Geek.

Have a wonderful weekend, everybody, and stay cool.

Between Roots and Rings

 

Last week I participated in a 5 day creative challenge that Melanie Rivers hosted. These were very short challenges that could be done in less than 30 minutes, sometimes as short as 10 minutes, but of course if you wanted to spend 2 hours on one challenge, you could do that as well. The general subject was "trees".

We started out in creating four backgrounds (I forgot to take a photo of the fourth one) with torn papers, gesso and some paint or ink. That was the first challenge. In the second one we collected words and made a "poem" - oh well, mine isn't a poem after all, but just snippets that fit my mood at that time.

No. 3 included a photo - maybe you recognize this picture from my "Tree Face" post. I combined it with a beautiful quote that I have loved for a long time.

On Day 4 we were asked to draw a tree. Melanie encouraged us to find the picture of a tree on Pinterest or in a magazine. I took one of my own photos of my favorite tree at the lake. I used a graphite aquarelle pencil by Faber Castell.

My drawing does not resemble the original very much, but who cares?

This is for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date - and of course we'll have food, too.

While we were in Alsace, we ate some of their local, but also more widely known French food. There are little restaurants everywhere that have lovely patios where you can eat and avoid the crowds inside.

Soup d'oignon - onion soup - is a very typical first course that is well known all over France. So far I was never able to make a really good one myself (you know, one that actually tastes "French").

One of the popular Alsatian dishes is Flammekueche (tarte flambée) which you can get in all kinds of variation. The original Flammekueche is with ham, onions and crème fraîche (left). The one in the middle has onions, pesto and escargots and on the right mushrooms are added as well.

A typical meal in a French restaurant has at least three courses, so what about dessert? Of course I had to have mousse au chocolat (right) which is my favorite. One evening I ordered a chocolat Liégois (left) - it was huge and I couldn't finish it. Good thing Kaefer was there to help me!

Which ones of the desserts would you have ordered?