Month: August 2012

  • Work in Progress: First Autumn Leaf

    While doing a brief hike this past weekend I spotted by first brightly-colored autumn leaf! If you know me at all, you know that I am head-over-heels smitten with Autumn. I am a big-time “leafer“. I love the bright-colored leaves, the smell of burning leaves, pumpkins, butternut squash soup, spicy beers, brisk mornings, and potted mums! Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I spotted this leaf….my first sign that my favorite season is around the corner.

    What I love about this leaf is that it looks like the red is slowly creeping over the green in the leaf and taking it over.

    To view the finished piece, the Autumn Leaves invitation, click here.

  • West Virginia: Hand-Painted View from Lodge

    Paintings by Hand-Painted Weddings.

    Currently, I am in the midst of a bit of painting exploration. I am playing around with different painting techniques in order to further refine my painting style. For instance, I naturally paint very detailed but am more in love with the paintings I do that are more loose. I’ve got to admit this is the same with my life. I’m constantly working on the balance between ambitious hard work and trying to go with the flow and allow my intuition to guide me. It is interesting how similar my painting inclinations are to my own personal inclinations. I believe that if people analyze how they work, that many of us have this in common.

    In this painting series, I start off by showing you the original painting I created at the lodge this past weekend. This was the view from the deck looking off onto a barn and, in the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains. The second two paintings (Take 2 and 3) were created using the original painting as a guide. You can see that I got a little bit more loose as I continued to revisit the same painting (ie. Take 3). There are things I like about all three of the paintings. I love the texture in the barn from the original painting. I love the bark on the large trees behind the barn on “Take 2”. I love the tree textures, the bright colors, and the mountains in “Take 3”.

  • Mini Vacation at the Lodge

    Last night my husband I returned home after a long weekend amongst the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia. We stayed in a lodge with 18 very unique and intelligent people as a 30th birthday celebration for one of Carl’s best friends. We played games (I was impressed by how many people on the trip adored Settlers of Catan), watched the meteor shower, and made some delicious food! I even got in a little bit of painting, but I’ll save that for a later post. No one had cell phone service or internet access at the lodge so it really allowed everyone to decompress. All in all, it was a very relaxing and fun mini vacation!