A Bag Of Small Things

It's been just a bag of small things that have been going on lately.

Did a couple of new drawings.
Getting hearing aids
Tried my hand at mat cutting for framing my art.
Great weather outside for hiking and fly fishing.

I did a couple of drawings. One was of the old RICE store on the way to Rocky Fork State Park in TN. We go there a lot to hike and fly fish. Very nice place and only about 20min from the house to the north.

Did a 2nd drawing of part of a barn that I liked as it had a "Keep Out" sign on it, but the door is open and you can see through to the other side. I just though it was funny and typical of old barns here that are wide open and you can see everything inside (nothing inside mostly).

I, like most older men have hearing loss at the high end of our ranges. I'm fine most of the time but in noisy places I loose conversations, thus the need for hearing aids. Soooooo, I waited and waited and waited until now. I hear and read about hearing aids failing, the very high cost and such so for my first (?) pair I decided to go with a brand new OTC (Over The Counter) pair that the FDA now allows for mild loss. This is from BOSE. I'll keep you updated on how it goes.

I had ordered a mat cutter to frame some of my artwork. I'm using existing 8x10 frames and adding a mat to them. Boy what a difference this makes! Pretty surprised how well they look now. I've done a few and I'll do a few more next week but here is a photo of one of them (below). OK, now I'm feeling better about my artwork after doing this.

The warm days have brought sunny days and this leads to more hiking and fly fishing. Doing pretty well balancing all of this, but hey, it's warm and sunny outside!

Anyway, enjoy what you can.

Comments

Still Life

Life is never still, at least I don't think you would want it to be. That's why so many of us (i.e., retired care free people) travel. Keep seeing new things and places. Well the Hurricane so far inland was a new thing and one I would have rather forgone but life is what happens. Life keeps moving. Except a still life is forever and captures a slice of time frozen in a painting. This is from a wooden bowl of pears onboard our ship during dinner one nice. Again, just thought it looked nice. Enjoy.

A Trip Abroad

Just back from our trip abroad as Asheville continues to recover from the hurricane. This trip has been planned for a long time and we almost didn't make it because our dog sitting business will be closed for a while. But make it we did and now we are back. We love Amsterdam. What a fun place to visit. So many things to too and do there. The weather was not the best but it did not have an impact on our visit. Just bundle up. Got some quick painting in while on the boat (i.e., Viking) as we moved from port to port. This painting is of a garden at a heritage site of windmills. I thought it looked nice. Nice time on the trip to de-stress from what was happing back home. We were fine back home but not everything is well with many others.

A Process

Once in a while I take photos of a work in progress. This is for me as well as others as the work moves from stage to stage. And it is done in stages with defined processes for each step. On this walkway overpass up in Spruce Pine, I've done both an ink / marker and an Ink / Wash on the same piece. This is the finished watercolor of the work. To start the process I did an ink drawing of it and then took a tracing from that. It's the tracing where I did another ink drawing but this time on watercolor paper. Tracings of a work is done with standard tracing paper. I get mine from CheapJoes.com and use the 8x10 size as that covers most of my needs. The tracing is done with a 0.3 ink pen (Winsor & Newton Fineliner). Once I have the tracing I can then use it for other paper or to do another work of the same subject. The tracing is just a start as I still need to get it transferred onto other paper. For that you need a very bright light...

A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

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