Rainy Days and Mondays....

When you see this photo larger you can actually see the whole tree branch in the raindrop. Imagine if I had a "real" camera with a real lens!

Behind blurred is the canoe and the deck and our lake...rain, rain, rain. Thunder and darkness today. I snuck down between showers but had to run back up the hill path in a shower that caught me again!

What to do? After a load of laundry and scraping the paint off the bathroom windows...head right to the studio!!!

It was SO dark at 10 am this morning that it looked light night outside the studio windows!!!

Yikes.

But the coffee was hot and Greg was off doing some chores out on the porch or up in the loft...(trying to cross some things off his honey-do list). Yeah!

So I pulled up that photo again of the Mount Dora Tea Room (FL) that I had on my iPad from April. I turned on some soft music and opened the studio window so I could hear the rain coming down gently. Very cozy.

I have been fooling around and having a ton of fun with collage and with acrylic and with fractured watercolor that I haven't really done what I would call a "pure" transparent watercolor in a long long time.

I was inspired by the wc exhibit in Kenosha, WI last month! As Marlene said...it was so beautiful that it took your breath away! So anyway...I thought in prep for the en plein air ahead I'd stick to the 10 x 20 format and use the Arches rough that I cut out for my sketchbook. I LOVE rough paper and haven't used it in ages. Gosh it felt good to use it again and watch the lovely colors drop into the textures and swirl around.

The brick entryway has wonderful and interesting bricks in it and I will need to think carefully about how much detail I want to put into that. Lots of different ways to show that. And I do not want to get SO fussy that I lose the simplicity of the scene.

Obviously the center of interest IS the archway and the light and shadows around it.

So now I am taking a break...time for lunch. I'll have some time to step away from it. The storm has shifted off and we are getting a little sunshine now at lunch time and the temps have moved up so I think I can take off my flannel shirt and substitute that with a tee! We'll have lunch on the screen porch and make our menu plans for the week. We both have some errands to run in Minocqua this afternoon and I will stop at Curves and work out before we head back to the cabin!