Hello Full Moon ~ I captured this shot in the front yard under the pine tree back when the moon was full and begging to have her picture taken. I love the time of day when the sky is clear and the setting sun is painting the sky with beautiful colors as a full moon is rising!

Two Abstract Paintings without titles ~ I've been working on both of these paintings this week, but it's been really, really, really slow-going. Ha, where are you muse? These are both acrylics on 8 x 10 inch stretched canvases. I'm thinking that the one on the bottom reminds me of a totem in a sandstorm. I may be able to at least finish these and give them a title soon...then again, maybe they are already finished and I just don't know it yet.

'Under the See' ~ I just finished this painting and it's acrylics on a 8 x 10 inch stretched canvas.

'Birth of a Sunrise' ~ Another painting in acrylics on a smaller 6 x 6 inch stretched canvas. I posted this in the WetCanvas challenge for February that JiMi had a wonderful theme for this month. Congratulations to both Jerald and his wife on the birth of their new baby boy!

Full Moon at Sunset ~ The moon has been so bright and full this week and the yard at night is just lit up by the glow...I grabbed my camera to try and capture this beauty right as the sun was setting.

**********

A very talented artist friend, Terri West from the Visual Fields blog, just presented me with an 'I Love Your Art Blog' Award...Thank you so much Terri and I love the look of your new website and blogs! I'm supposed to name 7 things I love and I'm going to think about them and name them in my next post. :p ...then pick 7 more people to pass this cool award on to!

Thank You Babs!! and some Lake Chesdin Sunset Photos ~ I want to thank my very sweet and thoughtful friend Babs for the wonderful card that she surprised me with for my 55th birthday this year (Yikes, am I really that old now)! Her card has a lovely print of one of her fantastic abstracts and she also sent me her red 'barking dog' ACEO abstract which matches the 'shaggy dog' abstract (yep Babs, I do see another dog in this one too)...now my 'shaggy dog' red abstract has some company and I treasure both of them! A very sweet thing to do, she also found a penny from the year of my birth to send. My husband was kidding with me and said it must have taken a lot of looking to find a penny that old! :) :) Thanks Babs, you are a dear friend!! I also put a wip I've been painting on the right side of my easel. I'll probably work some more on it before giving it a title and calling it finished. My husband took me up to Lake Chesdin this evening at sunset so I could get some photos:

Close-up of a tree and my favorite pic so far

My husband called this a 'gooney bird' but we think it's actually a crane

The boat dock

sunset peeping through lacy winter tree limbs

Sunset sky at Lake Chesdin, Virginia

Area 63 ~ What a crazy title for these paintings and it just sort of popped in my head. This is a triptych and they are both 5 x 7 acrylics on watercolor paper. I'm blaming the weird title on the fact that my husband downloaded the google earth program the other day. I've been virtually traveling all over the globe the last few days...what a mind-boggling program! I even walked in the neighborhood in Louisville, KY that I grew up in and saw the old house that I lived in as a child. I hate to tell my age here, (OK I'm turning 55 in less than a week LOL) but the last time I saw this house in person was about 40 years ago and I was so surprised that it's still there! My dad had turned the house into apartments when we lived there in the '60's. The story I heard as a child was that an artist had lived there at the turn of the century and she had a studio way up in the attic. I always thought that was fascinating and it may have been one of the influences which turned me towards making art! Talk about a blast from the past!

Pretty in Blue ~ This is my African violet flower soaking up some sunshine on the kitchen table. I got this little flower in a basket of plants back when my Mom passed away and that was in June '07. This is the first time I had tried to grow an African violet and my Mom always had really gorgeous ones blooming in the house when I was growing up. I'm hoping I inherited her green thumb since I've always loved plants too!

Winter Dreams ~ I guess dreaming is all I can do since we can't seem to get any snow here in central Virginia. We were supposed to get 1-2 inches last night and today but all the snow stopped at the border of North Carolina, south of us. I got all excited last night to see about 10 snowflakes blowing in the light on the porch but that's all we got. This little ACEO size painting is done in acrylics and I listed this in Ebay for the nfac contest which has the theme of 'Winter wonderland' this month. Here's the link for my listing and I guess the only snow I'll see is in my paintings unless mother nature gives us a surprise!

Ferris Wheel ~ acrylics on 8 x 10 inch stretched canvas. I'm not sure of the title for this one but this is what I was originally going to call it. I was going to paint some tropical fish swimming around, as it reminded me of an underwater scene but it was looking pretty busy already so I scrapped that idea. darn, I don't know what I'm doing wrong because some of my blog pictures will enlarge when clicked on and others wont. I uploaded the picture of my painting first and it won't enlarge but the others will??? :(

Crimson and Purple Sky ~ The sky turned to a most beautiful crimson and purple right before sunset so I had to run and grab the camera for these two shots!

Mantyhose ~ http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=37074

Good grief, what will they think of next?! This little short TV news clip is so hilarious and it sounds like the guy in the background is about to crack up from laughing! :)

Up above...

Little airplane ~ I was testing out the zoom feature on the camera and captured this little fellow zooming high above our backyard. They have airshows at the county airport every now and then and sometimes we get lucky to see the planes curving, soaring and zipping high over our backyard.

Zooming in on the moon yesterday evening right before dusk.

'Oh silvery sails, all tattered and torn

Answering the call of the siren...

Forlorn'

Song to the Siren ~ We had an art challenge in the abstract contemporary forum in the wetcanvas website this month and I finally got mine finished. For my intrepretation, I used acrylic paints, white gesso and black ink on 6 x 9 inches 140 lb. watercolor paper. Check out Babs awesome entry in her blog also! this was so much fun and very inspiring!

Hidden Man ~ Who is that little green man hiding under the pine tree among the red berry bushes? He's been snuggled down among the pine needles in our yard for about 5 years now and I think he is keeping the trolls out of our yard! I couldn't resist trying out my new camera on him today.

Cresent Moon in a Winter Sky ~ I absolutely love my new digital Canon powershot camera and I can't believe what a difference there is my photos now! We had another of those little cresent moon jewels in the sky along with a fiery sunset. I've noticed the days are getting just a little bit longer each day, yea!

Another Lovely Sunset Evening

Big and Little ~ I was struck by the huge difference in the size of my paintings here. I have art card size, or ACEOs which are 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches on top of the chest in my painting room (on the easel). Now if I could just finish some of them! Behind the chest, hanging on the wall, is one I stretched and painted in my college painting class and it's 24 x 36 inches! Yep, it's an antique because I painted it over 25 years ago! I have several others stacked in my closet that same size and for some reason I never felt they were finished. Maybe a good New Year's resolution would be to finish those huge canvases.

Christmas Eve Photo Op ~ I hope everyone had a Wonderful Holiday! I had to put the old camera on top of the TV and set the self-timer to get this picture of us after Santa's visit. It turned out sort of glarry but Santa brought me a new camera (yea!) which I tested out on Puddin' in the picture below.

Puddin' said, "Hey, I know I'm not supposed to sit on the kitchen table but I get such a good view of the bird feeders when it's raining outside!" I'm still trying to figure out the complicated directions on the new camera... instead of 'partridges in a pear tree', I can see about 25 doves roosting in the poplar tree in this picture. I think I'm going to love the new camera when I figure out how to use it!

Sunflowers in the Garden at Sunrise ~ I sold the original of this painting several years ago. I cropped a part of the photo from the original painting ACEO size and printed it out and it turned out pretty neat!

Blue Night Serenity ~ I hope I haven't posted this one before but I'm pretty sure I haven't. This is acrylics on a stretched canvas and it's 8 x 10 inches. I'm wishing everyone a:

VERY VERY VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Special Moon Event ~ Thank you Babs for letting me know about it because I didn't even see about it on the news here and had no idea the moon would be special tonight. We've had a week's worth of heavy clouds, rain and flooding so I was so glad that tonight the sky would be clear! Check out Bab's Off the Wall Art blog to discover why the moon looked so huge and beautiful tonight! I took about 10 photos this evening as it was coming over the horizon and even used my husband's shoulder as a tripod a couple of times. :) Ha, he didn't complain too much, just commented that it looked like the moon, only larger than usual! This is the only one that turned out good enough to share since the others were a blurry disaster. This one is a big blur too, but turned out kind of neat. That train of lights under the huge glow, which is the moon, are actually a couple of cars going up the road right as I snapped the shutter. Thanks Babs, from one moon watcher lady to another!

Celestial Wonder ~ 6 x 6 inches acrylics on stretched canvas
Oh! The cresent moon and planets in their special alignment the other night just took my breath away and I immediately had the urge to try and do a painting of it. There's no way I could capture the actual beauty of that sight, so I just painted my impression of what I felt looking up at the night sky! We are supposed to get a little snow tonight and they even have the winter weather advisory on TV. I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

'Celestial Wonder' and haha big mess in my studio...better known as spare bedroom or my painting room.

'Heart of Ice' ~ ACEO done in acrylics on 140 lb. watercolor paper

I listed this one on Ebay: Heart of Ice The listing fees have gotten lower there and I had some good luck with listing an ACEO print there last week.

OH Christmas Tree ~ You may be artificial, but you're still beautiful!! Well, we finally bought an artificial tree last year. After so many years of picking out a real tree every year...going to town to pick it out, bringing it home in the back of the truck, cutting off the bottom, finding the tree stand which is usually buried somewhere at the back of the attic, putting water in the stand and spilling it on the floor, sweeping up dried up needles all over the house, worrying about the thing catching on fire, some of us possibly being allergic to it, only having it up for 2 weeks....well you get the picture. Last year, it somehow felt a little depressing not to have a real tree, but this year I'm more than happy with it plus we get to enjoy it the whole month of December! I know I'm going to be eager to take it down right after Christmas though as we'll be really tired of looking at it by then! :p Ho Ho Ho

Icy Spirit Awakens ~ This is 5x7 inches, acrylics on watercolor paper. I used some gold interference and some glitter dust for a sparkly spot under the moon.

Metamorphosis ~ This little 6x6 inch stretched canvas has gone though so many changes, I now have the perfect title for it. I gessoed over one I didn't like, painted another, and then painted another over that one...then changed it yet again! Well this is the final version and there's about 3 paintings underneath this one. :p

Which reminds me, one of my all-time favorite short stories is 'The Metamorphosis' by author Franz Kafka. Very eerie and a great read!

More Christmas Trees ~ The bottom two photos are ACEO size paintings with sparkly stuff (crystal glitter) in the snow and the painting in the top photo is 5 x 7 inches. These are painted with acrylics on 140 lb. watercolor paper and I also used little touches of the pearl irridescent and gold interference acrylics in all of these. I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Tulip Poplar Tree ~ Rob planted this tree in our backyard years ago (maybe 12, I lost count) and it's grown to be the prettiest tree in our yard.

It was a sapling when we rescued it from the fate of bulldozers. They were building a new subdivision down the road from us and we were looking for trees to save and plant in our yard. I think we got very lucky when we rescued this one. We feed and water the birds under that tree and when the wind blows through it's huge leaves it makes a neat sound when the leaves 'clap' together. It turns this lovely yellow color in the fall and in the spring we're treated to big yellow flowers which look sort of like tulips. I even made some digi art to honor our favorite tree. I hope everyone has a creative and lovely weekend!

Fall Nocturne ~ I just finished this acrylic painting on an 8 x 10 inch stretched canvas. I had bought a huge sheet of translucent yupo paper to make some origami Christmas ornaments for the tree, but found out the paper is too thick for the use I'd intended it for. Sooo, I have been cutting and painting and experimenting with the stuff. I cut out a circle of it to use for the moon in this painting and glued it on the painting with gel medium. All I have to do now is coat the whole thing with gloss medium and call it finished. I hope youall had a happy and fun Halloween! I ate so much candy corn and it looks like I even spread a few pieces under the tree in my painting! :)