At last! Art on the Porch!

All winter long, Julia and I have been waiting to do art on the porch again. We both love it. Today was the day! Here's our spot:

 I find lots of artistic help over at Lisa's blog. A while back, she shared some "doodling" videos that I thought were so cool, so Julia and I started with that. Here's the video I watched:


This is Julia's pen doodle. She decided on a seashell theme, with seaweed.

We got the seashell idea from watching this fun video:

the evolution of a page from Alisa Burke on Vimeo.



She decided to color it with watercolors, using a brush. This was difficult, because she had little lines and lots of detail. She got frustrated, so she stopped this project. I was sad, because I thought it was going rather well.

I started by drawing this doodle. Simple flower theme:

A little light coloring with the crayons that Pom gave me, and it was done.

Unlike Julie, I was really getting into the doodling thing, so I did a second one. I stole her seashell theme. Here's my beginning:

And it ended up as this. On this one, I decided to use watercolors, and it was fun.

I'll mention also that we just use those really cheap watercolors -- the kiddie kind that come in a long plastic, orange tray with a snap lid and about 7 colors. It's amazing what you can do with them. And even when they're old, cracked and ugly, they really still work fine. Just add water :)
I'd taken a tomato and an apple on the porch too, so Julia decided to try her hand at the tomato. I'd told her a little about how to achieve the "light" effect on the rounded parts of fruit. Here's how it went for her.

She liked this a lot. We agreed it looked a little like a flower, a petunia perhaps. She decided on a blue background. This is watercolor too, and I think she did a good job on that lighting and the dark around the edges.

I, on the other hand, opted for the apple. After this point, I did outline it in pen. I really like doing that, like Pom does.

You may recall that Julia collected some river rocks last week at Montreat. Today she decided to paint some of them. She used acrylics for this.

There's a mama rock and a baby rock - haha :) For those who know our family, Julia was trying to think up "virtue" names for her rocks that had not already been taken by her cousins - haha!!!

Here's my mother's lily that I already showed you. To finish, Julia and I thought we'd try painting the lily.

My attempt wasn't too bad.

Then I outlined it in black. I was fairly pleased.

Then I saw Julia's, and I think you can see here the difference between someone with a real artistic mind (Julia), and someone ... without one. I love her curvy, crinkly edges. They are so right.  My straight-laced lily looks so wrong.

I like this very much. Isn't it fascinating to see the same object through various people's eyes?

In a way, that's what happens when people discuss topics. Today, I'm engaged in a discussion on facebook about health insurance and medical care. Goodness, but people have varied opinions! And when we all look at our world, and how it's going, and how it should be going, what different opinions we have! A multitude of lilies.