My favorite holiday is Halloween, so I like to make my own e card to send out to all of my friends and relatives. This year the inspiration was a pack of printed papers that my sister gave me to make cards. The images were fun, but I didn't want to cut up the images to make cards. I figured that I could just draw a spooky scene and characters. It took me a week to draw it in Illustrator. I wanted it to be an all vector image so that I could take it into Flash and animate it. It is just a very simple animation, but it did the job. I had thought, after the fact, that it might have been fun to do a little story with it. I wish that I had thought about it earlier. Oh, well maybe next year and there is Christmas to create something for.
Have you got some Halloween stories that might work with this silly haunted house scene?

Recently I've been picking up acorns on my walks in the mornings with the intention of painting them in watercolor. I like the striation markings on them and there is something about the ones with the little scaled tops that conjure stories of elves and fairies. I usually photograph my subjects, but I end up painting directly from the source if the subject will last. Leaves will change within hours, these acorns have been changing color within one day, but the orchids will last for weeks.

These acorns are from a Live Oak. There are several Live Oak trees on my walk that have been dropping acorns. The sound of the acorns dropping on the leaves is as intermittent and regular as water dropping from the eaves of the roof after a rain. If I listen, I can find an acorn that just landed close to me. The green ones, without blemishes, can be sprouted to grow little oak trees, at least that’s the information that I found on the internet. They are supposed to be unblemished, fresh acorns that when put in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for two months, will germinate. I have about 50 acorns in a plastic bag in the refrigerator now. They are supposed to be planted on their sides, in about 5 inches of soil, 2 inches from the surface. I hope most of them will sprout. I wanted to give the little trees to my sister. She and her husband have ten acres in Paso Robles that could use some more trees. The Live Oak stud the hills out there and do very well in the heat and dry conditions. All twisted and knarly, I often wonder how many of them are over 100 years old.

Do acorns knotted oak trees conjure visions of fall of fairy tales for you too?

I've begun painting a series of watercolor paintings of Phalaenopsis orchids. The hybrid varieties come in a large array of colors and markings, everything from white to magenta, spotted, like this one, striped combinations of both or just plain color. They are also called "Moth Orchids", because they look like a bunch of moths flying. The orchids are easy to grow and their flowers last a long time, giving me time to paint them in detail.




I use hot press blocks of Arches watercolor paper because I like the smooth surface for this detailed work. The hot press is less forgiving, the colors are harder to lift if you make a mistake, but I like the results.I usually lay down an ink stain undercoating, such as a lemon yellow for the leaves and stems. It makes the overall color more vibrant, as if lit with sunshine. Using inks also makes it much easier to paint over with out lifting the layer underneath. I did try some mediums to "fix" the color, but the results were fairly disastrous. I guess that I am not using them correctly. The medium mad it difficult to paint over again, the watercolor resisting to flow down on to the surface. I'll just do it the way I've always painted.







I've added a flying Ermine moth to this painting. It looks so much like this miniature, spotted orchid, flying in sequence with the flowers.




I'm fascinated by moths. I've also painted and drawn moths and butterflies with their interesting markings.Like leaves blown together on the ground in the fall, I painted yellow and orange butterflies, their wing patterns repeated in various positions and variations of tone and tint, bodies stacked one on top of another.




Now my problem is that the leaves are beginning to turn color and I love painting them too! I'm having a difficult time resisting picking them up on my daily walks. The pattern of the veins on the leaves, that persist as a skeleton of the original after the rest of the leaf fall away is amazingly beautiful and delicate.




Do you like collecting things with patterns too, leaves, rocks, shells or bird feathers? What do you do with them?