Faces - Again!

It's still February, and I'm still busy with the 29 Faces for the month. I keep painting and drawing, but I am a face behind - not too bad. I don't have a name for the girl on top, I call her "red cheeks", I obviously had too much water on my brush along with the red color.

I was in a devilish mood with this one:

and this girl is not in a good mood either.

Meet Mary (she looks a bit like my neighbor):

and Clara:

And those of you who remember the boy with the funky hair (I finally decided it's a boy) on the cover of an altered composition book from last Friday - the journal is done and it's in my Etsy shop now.

I'm linking up to Paint Party Friday and Sneak Peek Friday - artful and inspiring Friday, I love it!

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A Visit to the Nursery

My friend Jo and I spent a lovely morning together yesterday. As usual, we started out with breakfast at our favorite little cafe in Graton - they serve excellent coffee there and the scrambles are delicious as well.

The latte is served in real bowls, no paper cups here. That's the way I like it.

After that we were ready to visit one of our favorite nurseries - I know, it's only February, but we both love to garden and just wanted to "look".

The nursery always displays their stuff so nicely - our dreams could take off!

One day I will have a little pump like that in my garden!

I was good - I only bought a beautiful columbine and a small trellis that you can put into a pot. But in my head there are many colorful dreams of a beautiful garden this year. Every year I can't wait to get the garden going. The calendula are beautiful and rich right now, and since we have unusually warm weather the peonies are already on their way out of the soil. I have been trimming trees and cutting back old and dead branches and twigs, preparing the way for new growth. I feel whole when I can work in the garden and feel the soil between my fingers.

Are you a gardener? What are you planning to grow this year?

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Tulips and Books

As usual I am late for Photo Art Friday (yes, I know it's Sunday), but better late than never. For this week, Bonnie asked us to share a piece of photo art where we use one of her textures and then use a layer mask to finesse the texture application. It was quite a challenge, but I think I managed not too bad.

I used Bonnie's texture "desert canvas" in blending mode soft light at 100% and then used a layer mask in PSE to remove most of the texture from the tulips and their leaves. After that the tulips received some of the texture back, but lighter than before. It wasn't that difficult after all, it just takes some time and I had a harder time to decide when I was actually finished.

Bonnie's challenges help me to learn using PSE more and more efficiently, and I am very happy about that. Recently I have also taken more "still life" photos which is new to me and I haven't practiced very often. It actually also helps me to take better product pictures of the items for my Etsy store which is important to me.

I am also linking this to Life in Pictures at Coston Comba Photography, a photo blog I have just discovered.
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Still More Faces

Hard to believe... I'm still active in the 29 Faces challenge and I have 17 faces "under my belt" - the top one counts as two. I really love to paint these roundheads, they are so much fun. These are Mipf and Mupf, names that Kaefer gave them.

This is Isabel

She looks a little bit like my goddaughter, especially the eyes. Isabel (the "real" one) has quite unusual eyes and I tried to reflect it in this painting.

Now meet the skater who seems to be in a lousy mood

I still want to change her/him - make the eyebrows a little thicker, put a soul patch on, hang eight Olympic medals around his neck - well, I guess you know who this could become. Maybe.

After that I dipped my fingers - well, my brush actually - into watercolors again, and 1,2,3 "die wilde Hilde" (wild Hilde) evolved - I wonder what she is making up in her mind. It can't be good.

And last but not least, here's no-name - s/he sits on the front cover of a journal, an altered composition book that I am currently working on.

It's quite clear which faces I really enjoy, isn't it?

I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday and Sneak Peek Friday again, please take a look at all these wonderful artists. There is so much talent in blogland.

Love and Chocolate

A few days ago I played around with Scrabble tiles, chocolate hearts, a photo studio set up (improvising, of course) and my camera. When I uploaded these two pictures to Photoshop I further added texture and played around with a gradient - first time. I can't decide which one I like better - so I ask you: Which one of these two photos do you prefer, focused on the chocolate hearts or focused on the Scrabble tiles?

Wishing everyone a very happy Valentine's Day!

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Dew Drops on Smoketree

One morning I looked at the smoketree at my frontdoor and saw all these beautiful dew drops on it - of course I had to take a picture. And of course I had to add some texture!

Here's the "recipe":
- Levels adjustment
- Bonnie's texture "artist's easel" in blending mode color burn at 47% opacity
- copied it in blending mode soft light at 47% opacity
- some adjustment in hue/saturation and brightness
- Bonnie's texture "goodness" in blending mode vivid light in 55% opacity
- and a final levels adjustment

I love how the drops stand out and almost glow.

I'm linking this to Photo Art Friday - really really late this time (I missed it last week...)
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Four More Faces

I'm working on my 29 faces, doing one face a day and having a lot of fun. The one above I did yesterday, using oil pastels on a book page that I had ripped from "Wuthering Heights". The book page, of course, is an inspiration I got from Lisa's girls.

These two girls are charcoal ones, charcoal being my favorite medium for drawing faces at the moment.

She looks a bit mad - I think she needs some coffee.

And this one I did today, wanting to try something different - a different shape to the head, the eyes way lower in the face, clearly far from reality - and I love this sassy little guy.

It's Friday - which means Paint Party Friday and Sneak Peek Friday - that's why I like Fridays so much. I'm looking forward to visit all these inspiring artists.