I’ve been obsessed with Granny Smith apples and peanut butter, lately. Thomas says that is, coincidentally, his very favorite food. All foods are his very favorite.
Author: Shelly
Four Leaf Clover
I was walking Thomas in the rain, and he was taking his sweet time sniffing around, so I entertained myself by looking for four leaf clovers. I found one! I haven’t found one since I was a little kid.
Flowers, Finally
Hosta
Daylily
Daylilies
There are finally a few things blooming in my garden. I think this may be it for the summer, though, because literally nothing else is growing. Everything I planted from seed came up, then… Nothing… Two months later, they’re still all tiny little seedlings. I have no idea why they’re stunted, but this year was not a good garden year.
Found Photo Project
I finished the found photo paint sketch project I started a couple of weeks ago. I got a really nice hard-bound scrapbook at Goodwill, as well as an old magnetic photo album full of someone’s vacation photos from Hawaii.
I separated out the seascapes and landscapes and did paint sketches from them in the scrapbook, using gouache and watercolor. There are 29 paint sketches in all.
Now I can spend tomorrow playing with collage.
Five Minute Watercolor Sketch
watercolor on cold press paper
I only have a few more of these little paintings left before the book is full. I was tired of painting on cardstock though, so I did this one on watercolor paper.
Paint Sketches
I used my day off to play with paints. These are all from found photos, in a scrapbook I found at Goodwill.
Sketches
watercolor and gouache on paper
These are the last paint sketches of June.
Crisscross Applesauce
I didn’t pose him like that. He’s just ridiculous, all on his own.
Things to Read
Reading List (pdf)
A million years ago, when I was a junior in high school, I took a humanities class. The school I went to was a lab school attached to a state university, so part of the deal was that the students were basically guinea-pig-slash-gold-fish hybrids. We were studied and experimented on. One of those experiments was this humanities class. It was team taught by one English teacher and one History teacher. We also periodically had observers from the education department at the university, sitting in the back of the room, watching us stuff our heads with information and try to synthesize it all.
I was 16 years old. That class broke my brain. Nothing I took in college came close to comparing, in mental difficulty or in the sheer mountains of work required. I’ve tried to explain the experience to others, but the response is usually, “Yeah, I had a hard class, too.” I’m not sure the experience was as universal as one might assume.
Last weekend I sorted through a bunch of old papers and binders, weeding out things I no longer want to hold onto. My humanities binders were in the pile. I flipped through them, and I thought it might be entertaining to put together a bibliography of the readings from the class. Four pages later, I’m starting to see why that class was such a monster. That’s a lot of material to ask a kid to ingest! I don’t know how we did it then. I know I couldn’t do it now, even if I treated it like a full-time job.
Paint Sketch
gouache on paper
If nothing else, I’m learning to paint palm trees.
red paper boat 