March

We don't have any major events to tell about, but the boys are finally over (let's hope) getting a cold every other week and they are loving going outside more often. They make up games on the trampoline and so far no one has been seriously injured. So all is well! I love the warm days here and there, anything above 50 degrees and I find a way to get outside.











The purple flowers are rock cress (aubretia). And of course the yellow flower surrounded by frost is a pansy.  I planted them last fall for the first time and I like how they liven up the yard before everything else. The other blooms in the yard are the forsythia bush, the daffodils and hyacinths. Before long the flowering pear, chokecherry, and crab apple trees will bloom too.

There was one major wind storm that seemed to blow our remaining mulch on many of our flower beds away so we decided to pile on new stuff. Jared has a kind co-worker who lent us his hydraulic dump trailer so we were able to get 13 yards of mulch in two trips. It put our truck to the test. And our wheelbarrow and backs. Some areas of our yard still look like a scene from the movie "Holes". The two main reasons we use the mulch is that it prevents moisture from evaporating from the soil as quickly and because it helps smother the weeds. It really only improves the soil into the first couple of inches but it does look nice.

For lack of anything else to post, I'll show the progression of a 6'x4' painting that I hope to hang on our living room wall soon. It is from a photo I took at Bryce Canyon. Picture number one here is just establishing important lines and separating areas of the image.

Step two I start to make lines more individual and shapes more specific with a few patches of middle value added in. The drawing stage is done with type of vine charcoal that looks like, well, a piece of burnt vine.

This photo shows the beginning of figuring out the darkest and lightest areas so that the middle values can be judged more accurately.

This is the finished drawing stage before I added any color. The previous photos looked more brownish because of the lights I had on but this one shows the color of the charcoal more truly.

Here I added some thin washes of color to separate warmer foreground color from background. Then a few of the more intense oranges were painted in. Although I usually use oil paint, this painting is acrylic because I didn't want all the fumes from thinner/cleanup. That's been nice.

And here is a fairly recent photo. The painting is still not done (easily the longest I have ever taken on a painting due to many things) but is 85% there.  Hope you weren't bored out of your gourd with this post but next month will be more fun with Bennett's birthday and Easter.