happy monday!

dears, how was your weekend? ours was glorious. just glorious. lovely dinner with friends. walks through the park. the kite runner. a bit of thrifting. drawing. a nice break from the week.

i have big plans for this week and hope to have some swell news for you soon.

one thing i would really like to do this week is spend some quality time painting. since my schedule has tightened up a bit in the last three weeks, there has been a shortage of studio time. this must change. tonight. i will paint.

Peace.

Little things!

Darlings,

At long last, I mustered the courage to participate in the wonderful Illustration Friday. This week's prompt is "little things" and I imagined a council of little things (spiders, inch worms and the such) meeting by moonlight.

Oddly beautiful.

This crazy little tiger-lily spider (that's the name i gave it) moved onto our back porch a few weeks ago. He built an elaborate, sturdy web and caught lots of bugs. Then on Tuesday, another spider invaded his turf. I watched a spider fight. It was pretty brutal. This guy won and the interloper scurried away. It was pretty freaky. We don't tolerate that kind of violence in our house, so my husband moved him to the backyard. (emphasis on *moved*. there was no spider-killing involved.)

Spiders are fascinating creatures. They are amazingly beautiful and complex, but I've been bitten by a brown recluse (on my face, no less) and I must admit to a lingering fear of these critters. Either way, they're beautiful on paper, er in digital format. Don't you think?

I altered the lighting in this shot a bit to highlight his stripes, since I took the shot in the evening.

To link to the shot on flickr, click here.

On flowers. On bees.

I noticed recently that my paintings have been filled with flowers all summer. Here's another. It's just waiting for a bee to land on it. I'm not sure if I have mentioned my sorrow about the disappearance of honey-bees on this blog at all, so if I haven't I will just say it now: "at our house, we are distressed about the crazy disappearance of honey bees." If you would like to learn more about this sad state of affairs, read this. So in light of all this distress I feel about those little bees, seeing actual honey bees buzzing in our herb garden fills me with great joy. This joy turns quickly to worry as I see my dog trying to eat the bees. No joke. She tries to eat the bees. If they were just regular old yellow jackets, I probably would not make such a fuss, but for honey bees-- damn straight. Isn't that just life sometimes: when the bees aren't there I worry. When the bees are there, I worry. So it is with this delicate balance that this little sketch came to be. And now you know.

Caterpillar macro - isn't he cute?

Caterpillar macro - isn't he cute?
Originally uploaded by Vanessa PR

Another fabulously executed shot I found on flickr. Vanessa Pike-Russell captured this little tyke with a macro lens. See what I mean about insects being an endless source of fascination?

Bug Obsession

I have become a wee bit obsessed with insects these days. It all started when I saw a beetle on my back porch last week with very crazy markings. Here is the first in a long line of bug sketches.