Under Lavender Skies

Hello again, I hope you all started your week off on the right foot!  I present to you a very short story, both characters (I am counting the cat as a character), remain unnamed.  However, I do have a name for the girl that you meet and it's possible that you will meet her and her cat again very soon, maybe even her Mother and Grandmother too.  Enjoy!  It was that time again when the days were accompanied by a perfect breeze yet the nights with a startling and unexpected chill.  I had left the house, enjoying the breath of air on my bare arms, and returned by grabbing the first blanket I could see and wrapping it around my shoulders.  "I'm home! Kitty?" I called into the dark hallway, I am not exactly frightened of the dark but it was unsettling, seeing nothing but a hollow black hallway ahead. I grabbed my Halloween witch hat, which I added a thick and flowy orange ribbon to (I had been working on a couple of Halloween crafts before leaving the...

I am really proud of how this one turned out!  It's a self portrait from a photo that my sister took of me about a year ago. Scroll to see the reference photo.  It took me three weeks, working on it 2-4 times a week (I need to start keeping track of hours spent on each project). Scroll to see a couple stages though I didn't didn't take a photo after every time I finished painting.  I hope you like it! 

Happy Monday!  If you didn't notice, there was no post last week because my family and I went camping (pictures coming soon). Last week was the first Monday I have ever missed a post. I have gone from being really motivated and writing every week, to posting (mostly) posts that I wasn't proud of but putting out because it was a Monday, to saying to myself, and others, that I will make simple posts revolving around a poem, that still take quite a bit of work, to being where I am now and being okay with skipping a week. I actually did finish this post last week but wasn't able to schedule it in time and I wanted to do what we go camping to do: live in the moment and take time to breath. So you know what, I'm okay with missing October 11ths post.  Please enjoy this beautiful piece of writing by Mary Oliver, my favorite poet. I hope it will brighten your Monday just a little.    ✰✰✰

I am an oil painter now...  It's not that I didn't consider myself an oil painter before. If you paint, you're a painter, if you write you're a writer. I don't believe that you have to sell a painting or a book to consider yourself those things.  But this painting (pictured below) changed it for me and really made me realize that oil painting is the paint that I like best.  I originally began this painting with acrylic paints. I thought it would work better since many sections needed to dry before I could add more. It ended up going in the opposite direction.  Acrylic paints dry really fast, they were drying on the palette before I was able to mix colors. I've gotten to the point in practicing oils that using acrylics was actually much harder.  The fact that oils take longer to dry is something that beginner oil painters assume will be more difficult, at least I did a while ago, but it is actually an asset.  With practice, I have gotten to the point that oi...