Faux stone wall

 Here's a section of the retaining wall and concrete outbuilding that I am nearly done painting. I'll be going back to work on it tonight.

 

Painting a big wall

I’ve been putting in quite a few hours over at my daughters’ school painting a bare concrete retaining wall and concrete shack (which used to house a boiler) to match the stonework of the school building.  It’s about 675 square feet, so it’s far and away the biggest “canvas” I’ve had to work on.

I’ve done my best to keep the budget low, so in purchasing the exterior latex paint I’m trying to work with the fewest number of colors possible.  I have white, black, a blue-gray, and a yellowish orange.  It’s been a challenge.  As of the night before last, I finally got all the fake stones painted in with at least one coat of paint.  I’ve been altering my technique and experimenting as I go, so I feel like I’m getting better…and right when I got to the last few stones I feel like I figured out what I was doing. I wish I knew when I started what I know now!  But I think I can pull it all together.

Now I’m going back over it all, altering colors, shading, making it more uniform, and looking for ways to put in a sense of shadow and highlight.  I was putting in shadows last night, but it was getting so dark that I couldn’t accurately see what I was doing.

Face in the window

Pen and ink house portrait

 

Here's my most recent completed house portrait (and a detail), ink on Bristol paper.  The size is 11 x 15.

Velvet Ant

 

 

While I was painting outside the other night, I saw this bright red velvet ant.  I tried to get a photo, but it kept ducking under leaves and was running erratically, so none of my pictures came out.  This was the best one; you can see its red abdomen in the middle of the screen.

 

I think this is only the third time in my life I've seen a velvet ant (actually not an ant, but a flightless wasp), so I was happy to notice it.

Thppppt

House drawing in progress

 It still requires a lot of shading, and it's not a very good photo, but here it is anyway: the current house portrait I am working on.  It's a very pretty house.  I hope to have it done within the next week.

Monopoly

This photo is from a few weeks ago.

House Painting in 2010

I think this is from two years ago, when we painted the back of Mom and Dad's house.  Brian risks his neck while Kevin supervises.  That's some scary fun right there.

I just found the photo on my phone among the old pictures and realized I probably never showed it to anyone.

Run aground

The younger daughter and I went canoeing out at Jefferson Memorial Forest on Saturday.  She started out well, and I broke out the camera, but then she went all Italian cruise ship on me and forced me to paddle. I thought six-year-olds could handle a canoe better than that. Jeez.

Priming

So far I've primed about 450 sq feet and 1,000,000 rolly polies.

Green bee in my garden

It looks to me like this is an Agapostemon Virescens, also know as a metallic green bee, a memeber of the sweat bee family.

Lunch, Lily, and Little Sketch

Today for lunch I went for a walk behind our office building, in the woods along Goose Creek. I encountered this lone lily growing in the woods, pretty and sort of odd.  I wish the flash from my phone camera had not washed out the colors so much.

 I also made a little ballpoint sketch of another plant growing next to a picnic bench on which I saw for a while.

I stood on a bridge and looked in the creek for fish I'd seen there before, but I didn't see any.  They must have been hiding, but perhaps after weeks and weeks of drought and high temperatures, they perished.

The blue jays were raucus.

Another house portrait in progress

Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Fishing video

I found this entertaining...

Metal detecting lead

 

 

There's a house near my office building that I notice each time I drive past.  It's a large, old house. I don't know how old, but I'm sure it's pre-1900.  I notice it for two reasons: It would be a nice house to draw or paint, and the yard would be nice to metal detect.

 

For much of the past year, I've looked when I've driven past to see if anyone was outside for me to stop and ask about metal detecting.  Finally, today, I saw a work crew.  I stopped and went back to look closer; it looked like they had been painting, and there was a truck for a hardwood flooring place, and they were cleaning off the front porch.  I asked if the property owner was around, and they told me to knock on the back door.

 

I'm usually pretty uptight about talking with people I don't know, so knocking on a stranger's door is hard for me, but I try to foster a little glibness now and then.  So I knocked and waited. Then I rang the doorbell. Then I knocked again. No answer.

 

I walked back down the long drive to my car, and crossed paths with a man walking across the yard.  I asked him if he was the property owner, and he said he was, so I explained my purpose.  He seemed like a nice guy, and told me that they were preparing for a wedding (which is funny, because even though there was nothing wedding-related in sight, I couldn't see that large old white house in a large green yard with white trucks and working people dressed in white without thinking that they were setting up for a wedding.)  I gave him my card, and he said he'd set it aside and call.

 

He also said the yard had been metal detected before, but not much had been found. However, it's a very large yard.  I have to think that there is some interesting stuff there, somewhere.  Here's hoping!

Fw: Phone

Here's the email I just sent to Kevin.  I tried to make sure it was written in such a way as to be understandable by one of his younger generation.  It's just the sort of thing he likes.  I should also add that the screen touch-keys on my phone are tiny and sensitive, my fingers are not tiny and sensitive, and I didn't bother to correct mistakes.

 

"Hey k i lost my old phone n now i need your phone number man can yoi plz ail it to me? How i like my mad textin skillz? Luv i bro.

Mark"

Sent from my Motorola Smartphone on the Now Network from Sprint!

Sent from my Motorola Smartphone on the Now Network from Sprint!