Still choosing...

I've been off line for a few days...one reason is that I fried my external modem on my iMac in a power surge on Friday.  Sigh.  It pays to get a VERY good surge protector AND run the phone line through it too (which I had forgotten to do).  Sigh.  Also I have a terrible cold.  No one gets a cold in August!  But one of our guests a week ago had one and left it with both my husband and me.  (Nice gift, huh?).  Whine.  Today was the first day I felt able to get back to studio!!  We are both still sneezing and coughing but we are drinking tons of hot lemonade and tylenol and chicken soup.  You know the routine.  

Back to the Christmas card design.  Despite the goal of a tropical card I keep falling back into more traditional scenes.  Actually, the floral is holly...and it is my Florida holly tree on the patio which I painted two winters ago on Masa rice paper.  Do you think it looks too much like cherries?  In painting this one I wet the rice paper, crinkled it, glued it 140 # Arches paper with YES glue and let is thoroughly dry.  Then I taped it down and with a pencil lightly suggested where I wanted the berries so I could paint around them.  Then I re-wet it and painted the berries first, letting them dry.  Then I went back and began designing the leaves using lightest greens first and gradually darker, painting negatives as I went along.  At the end I put the highlights on the berries with white qouache. 

Has anyone yet seen Julie/Julia?  I went to see it last night and it was really fun!  And a large part of the movie revolves around blogs which is totally fun.  I adore Meryl Streep. She can do anything.