Another circle

round the sun yes indeed. There and back again.

Finally today the internet guy came and fixed my pitiful internet connection. And then he called my cell phone from my home phone number – probably from the outside box… ah the wizardry of internet phone guys.

So here’s to another year.

Tonight Mom and I had dinner:

Also the world needs more serene cat photos:

An unexpected bonus of trying to paint the geranium is that it’s still in surprisingly good condition, as are my other two, because frankly I paid more attention to them over the summer. Most of the time that involved dumping out the extra water left by torrential rain but for the hanging one it still involved watering.

I had penciled some thoughts onto my pochade box but need to find a way to make them readible and permanent:

INTENT • CONFIDENCE • RISK • PATIENCE*

(Standard caveat applies here, Persistence>Patience although in watercolor you do need patience to let things dry or dry some before continuing.)

And then I need to get out and paint more. But I did survive another August Postcard Poetry Fest – thirty-one plus poems written and sent out to people all over the USA and world. It’s a fun group.

I became a member of the Berkshire Botanical Garden (formerly the Berkshire Garden Center) so I can drop in to paint over the course of the year. That’s the plan – add more places to paint.

Palette Report – Mijellio Fusion Airtight

In June while I was getting ready for a week-long watercolor class I posted a photo of a “travel” palette I had set up with the colors suggested by the teacher. Several people asked about it and I thought now, having used it awhile since I’d give a few thoughts about it. Here it is right after I loaded it up with paint.

Here’s a closer look from the other day when I was out painting. I wish I had taken a better view but I was interested more in what was going on in the seal area.

This is after I washed it with just some water and a fingernail brush and a couple paper towels. I thought I would be taking out the gasket that you can see but it didn’t seem to want to come out and I didn’t want to dig it out and then not be able to get it back in.

There are a number of brands of this type of palette out there. I got one that is rather generic and this is a popular brand – Mijellio Fusion Airtight/Leakproof Palette. I honestly don’t see any difference between the two palettes (except someone had nicked the removable inner mixing tray out of the generic one, but since I never take it out of the one that has it, I’m not too worried about it) other than the color of the lid.

I do like the size of the wells and the size of the mixing areas and it is fairly light to carry. I set it on top of my pochade box in its travel bag and it rides flat. I started doing this because it wasn’t really dried when the class started and it was very hot and humid that week so it never really dried then either.

I don’t find that paint beads up, but I don’t worry about that anyway. I don’t remove the clear removable tray to use as another mixing area although I’d be tempted to put additional globs of paint on it for an extended palette sometime. Until then it just sits in the lid as my bigger mixing area.

I DO find that some colors – cerulean blue I’m looking at you dude – will not stick to its well. That one in particular but also the orange (also a stickier, less drying paint) and others have at times slid right out of the well into the mixing areas. I use a bit of broken credit card or plastic knife to scrape them back into the well but it’s messy.

This led to the messy edges but in all honesty nothing seems to escape out of the palette so I am grateful for that. Someone had asked if it kept the paint moister and I’d give it a “sort of” – the paints that are stickier by nature stay stickier and I’d say the rest are perhaps marginally easier to re-wet.

So there you have it yet another palette review for the world.

Beware Women With Tools

The other night a state trooper stopped me to tell me I had a brake light out. At the end I asked – ummm which side? And he told me – driver’s side, ma’am. So the next day I went to my favorite NAPA store and got a couple replacement brake lights. I found instructions online for how to do the task and they said:

The tools needed to complete this procedure include a 10mm socket, a 1/4″ drive ratcheting wrench, a plastic automotive panel pry bar and a Torx T25 star bit screwdriver.

So in the DIY spirit and feeling like I’ll be doing this again I picked up these at Home Depot tonight on the way home. Had a little multi-tool thing in the paint supplies to get the tools out of the packaging. I felt good about it. That little thing is handy.

Got home just in time to replace the burnt out one before it was too dark. Will replace the other side another time when it’s daylight. The only tricky bit was taking the electrical plug out – had to look at it to see where the snap part was so I could get it off.

The Seventh of August

It was really hot and humid today. I had thought to go out painting in the morning but decided to stay in and see if it cooled off enough to head out in the early evening. Had some real rain and close lightning for a bit and gave up on the idea of painting so I got some dinner instead. Then it was about 20 degrees cooler so I headed over to the local conservation area and took a bunch of photos. Now I’ve got to get a poem together for mailing out tomorrow.

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August Already?

That means it’s time for August Postcard Poetry once more. This year I really feel the struggle between words and painting/visual stuff, but will endeavor on. First a quote via Brain Pickings:

The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. — Tennessee Williams

Today on Facebook we kept on keeping on but we put some extra effort into posting some funny stuff and we succeeded! Almost felt like the interwebs of days gone by but in these days having some funny stuff (even obligatory cat photos are good) is super important. I explored the web and the non-news-news awhile and just posted interesting and often pretty things. It’s all good.

In that vein, I have been lax in uploading and sharing photos of recent sunsets and clouds seen locally:

First, July 27, 2018:

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on an evening with a lot of still-coming weather.

The next night I went to a local conservation area after work and arrived just in time to take these photos. I then quickly set up my painting gear, put some cobalt blue onto paper to start the sky and promptly got rained on. (The good news – the next day I brushed the pages of the sketchbook with clear water and was able to remove ALL the blue and use those pages for something else!)

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And then tonight, wherein I stopped because of a band of huge towering white clouds which had moved far off by then. There were already a few people snapping away at the setting sun but I took a lot of photos of the rest of the clouds too.

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