As Summer approaches the days have been getting very warm. We’ve had many sunny days in the 70s and 80s (F). Flowers are blooming, our vegetable garden is coming up, and everything is green. I love Summer. It’s my favorite season. It’s the time that I do most of my living. I feel healthier in the Summertime, I suppose because I am outside more, soaking in sunlight and fresh air, being more active, mentally and physically. Life seems more colorful, because it is. The Summer is very stimulating for me. Sunshine, flowers, tending to our vegetable gardens, walking my dogs on the wooded trails around the river below us, bird watching. The sunshine and the greenery put me in a better mood, for certain. It inspires me and calms me. It’s healing. Winters here are long, cold, and brutal, and by the end of winter, my health is usually suffering, so in the warmer months I try to spend as much time as I can outside, in nature, when it’s most alive, and there are so many colorful things around me to translate through paint and pencil.
I’ve been painting outside often over the past couple of weeks, out on our deck under the open gazebo. I’ve been painting tiny pictures of birds, using the small travel watercolor palette set that my wife gifted to me last Christmas. I first mentioned that gift in my January 2026 blog post. Since the weather has become nicer, I’ve finally been using it and I love it. It’s been fun because it is so unobtrusive. It’s lightweight and fits in my pocket. As I started saying, I’ve been on a bird kick and, so far, I have painted a Gold Finch, an Oriole, and a Blue Jay. Painting outside on sunny days, listening to the birds sing along with the breeze in the trees, has been very peaceful and grounding. I imagine I’ll walk my mini palette down to the park or the woods one sunny morning and have a seat somewhere to see what inspires me. Even if I didn’t paint anything, it would still be good for my health.
I’ve been getting used to transparent watercolors again, relearning them. I worked with watercolors often when I was in high school (which was 40 years ago), but I hadn’t touched them since then, until recently. So, we’ve been becoming reacquainted. I’ve done a lot of gouache work, which is an opaque watercolor, but transparent watercolors are a different beast, a very different process than gouache. You work from light to dark and there are many interesting textures and effects that you can achieve with transparent watercolors. One also needs to get the hang of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques and the different viscosities of your paint and/or washes and how your paper reacts to it. To do it well, there are things to know, and I am reknowing it and even learning some things I didn’t know.
My tiny palette has eight wells to fill, so the colors I chose were lemon yellow, yellow orange, bright red, crimson red, forest green, ultramarine (blue), burnt sienna, and black. The set came with three fillable water brushes of various brush sizes. I can make a fairly fine line but have to be careful of how much water is coming out of the brush. A sheet of paper towel is handy for regulating that.
I continue to make small watercolor ACEO art cards. I’ve sold a few too. The cards have been great watercolor practice. I listed six more cards on eBay since my last blog post, and right now have six more nearly ready to list. Below are the cards I listed most recently, at the time of this post. With this batch, I started giving the cards radius corners, for a more finished look.
The art cards have been a lot of fun, and a nice change of pace. They’ve been a fresh challenge and have kept things interesting for me. As an artist, I enjoy the freedom to work in many different mediums and dimensions. Each one is conducive to creativity and learning, and has something to offer my art.
I have an 18 x 24-inch acrylic painting on my easel which I would like to get back to. I started a timelapse video of it, months ago, but I set the painting aside and started dabbling in the small art cards and my eBay store. Spring planting has gotten in the way a little bit too. ‘Tis the Season.
That’s what’s new. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. Enter your email address in the window below to subscribe and receive email notifications when I post updates here.