To Boldly Go where no artist has gone before...

Trying to get back outside more to sketch. I started this post last Thursday evening but as I was typing it, my daughter sent us a text “I feel like there’s no way you guys didn’t hear that explosion? I just saw it on FB” So, I didn’t finish this because we sort of were a little distracted…lol… We had scooped up the dog children and put them in their car seats and drove over to the water. The…

Some Valentine Art for you to enjoy today. Over the past couple of days, I have been working on some Valentine’s Day art. I was given 5 prompts to post over the past few days, and today. The prompts came from a small group of artists that I have been working with on line. The leader of the group, Flori Fama, posted 5 prompts for Valentine’s Day and we each came up with our own…

My book tracker for 2026 Over the summer of 2025, I attended a virtual week long event hosted by Peggy Dean. One of the artists contributing to the event was Jessica Mack. She presented a Bullet Journal (aka BUJO) spread that she makes every year in her BUJO to track the books she read during that year. I use Goodreads for tracking my reading, but this is waaaaayyyyy more fun. Now I do…

The last 6 holiday sketches and saying good-bye to 2025 I am closing out 2025 with my last holiday sketches of 2025. Plus how this year went…. 2025 as the new year At the beginning of 2025, I sat down with my Bullet Journal and various artists’ suggestions on how to plan out your year; setting goals and scheduling target dates, and so on. “Yeah, I GOT this,” I was thinking as I planned out…

Here’s a peek at what I have been creating this month Aside from the usual mayhem that December brings…I have also been working with a small group to do a Christmas Challenge. You can read more about it on my Substack. Day 1 – Odd Stocking Revisiting an old “friend” that has been frequently used in the past. A Pier One Stocking we purchased many years ago because of its quirkiness. I have…

Yesterday, John and I had to make the tough decision to say good-bye to a member of our family. He was a long haired Chihuahua who came into our lives March 2 of 2011. Mack was born at Christmastime, and Christmas was one of his favorite times of year. He was especially fond of unwrapping gifts, even if they didn’t belong to him. Christmas will be really sad without him. He was just like a child,…

I have so many Chihuahuas that I have sketched or painted that I had a bit of a tough time choosing which ones to post. I decided to repost some of my Tiny Dogs from my Tin Dog series of 2020. These tiny dogs were painted in a tiny sketchbook that was provided by the (sadly now defunct) Sketchbook Project. Many of these tiny dogs were Mack and Chloe, but I also used reference photos from the…

I am a member of a Pattern Club called Pattern & Process. It used to be Photoshop Club but it has evolved. We had a Zoom session today and we sketched some reference photos. It was interesting to see how people used the photos. These are mine:

Frog Hollow with all of this rain! Quick 4×6 sketch using Viviva Colors…more or less experimenting with the concept of color cards instead of paint and or tubes. It was a stormy day today and the neighborhood frogs loved it.

Wooden floral hearts These floral arrangements are two little paintings completed on 4 x 4 wooden hearts. I purchased the wooden hearts around Valentine’s Day.  These hearts are only available around the holiday, so I purchased several packs before they disappeared until next year. Last year, when a friend asked me to paint a portrait of her cat on one of these heart, I was very lucky that I…

I kinda messed this one up a little and I tweak it until it’s dry. It’s getting late and I have to go to bed so this one is in the rough draft state for today. Today’s prompt is “boots.”

The prompt for today is “discover.” Lucy and Mack have “discovered” live Halloween decorations. Carved pumpkins seem to attract all sorts of creatures. When we lived up North. the local squirrels would eat the Jack O’Lantern every year. They would also eat the uncarved pumpkins, too. Here in Florida, we found out the hard way that you don’t put the pumpkins out as decorations until the actual…

So much to do and so little time. I debated on whether or not I wanted to do Inktober this year. I also debated what I wanted to draw. Did I want to follow the suggested prompts, do my own thing or follow other lists. Or just pick and choose daily from various lists. Did I want to commit to anything this year? Halloween and my mom were a thing. They went hand in hand. My mom loved Halloween.…

Short and sweet for this post… Here is my next summer painting…a palm tree island with an egret. Enjoy!

It has already been a warm summer so far, so I thought that I would do a painting of a “cool” item from the suggested list. “Popsicle” is one of the suggestions on the list, though I am not sure why “ice cream cone” isn’t, but just as well, they are both a ton of Weight Watcher points. ( Side note: We were in Costo yesterday and for the heck of it, I checked out the Weight Watchers points for…

Here is painting #7. One of my favorite flowers to grow and I am surprised I don’t have any here in my garden. I used to plant seeds every year when I lived in NJ and I would watch the goldfinches hang upside down to pull the yummy seeds out. I found one of those photos and there were bees and goldfinches in my sunflowers.. We were up in NJ recently to visit family and we drove by my former…

One of the prompts for the daily painters challenge is “fish.” We have a mahi-mahi metal wall hanging that I have no idea where we inherited it from, but it has been in my father-in-law’s house in Port St Lucie, migrated to our Jensen Beach house where it sat in storage and then it moved again with us to where we live now, We hung it on our back fence. I never knew what it was until today when I…