January Virtual Art Walk

Once again this month, a handful of us artists who blog our art have gotten together for a virtual art walk! While there are art walks scheduled for January down here in Florida, a lot of the country is just not feeling it due to normal January weather, so why not do the art walk idea online? We have a nice selection of virtual art booths to browse.

January virtual art walk preview image
January virtual art walk – a quick preview

Art walk virtual booth 1: Snowy Scenes for January

We’ll start this month’s art walk up north in snow country, where Jo Wortman of Siena Blue up in New York has posted a bit of a retrospective on her snow scenes. She does an overview of her snowy landscapes so far this winter, and compares them to paintings she did in 2022 and 2021. I can certainly see the difference, and like other commenters on her post, I think the watercolor painting where she worked from a reference photo she found on Unsplash – as opposed to following a tutorial – is her strongest in this category. It’s interesting to see how her earlier work hints at this.

snowy landscape of a stream in winter by Jo Wortman of Siena Blue
Jo Wortman’s snowy landscape in watercolor

Virtual art walk booth 2: Braving the cold weather

Jim Hughes lives in Minnesota, and that area gets COLD in the winter. That doesn’t seem to deter Jim in his quest to get a really good photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker. We have them down here as well, but they are definitely camera-shy. Jim unleashes his creativity to solve the challenge. He basically built a fake tree trunk and put a suet cake just inside it – close enough to his porch to get the photo he desired. Then he got up before sunrise enough mornings in a row until he was finally able to slip out onto his porch in subzero temperatures to get the shot. I think he nailed it.

close-up photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker by Jim Hughes
Jim Hughes’ detailed photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker

Art walk booth 3: Steve Heap takes us to Hawai’i

Next booth for our January virtual art walk is where Steve Heap of Backyard Image takes us to the Hawai’ian island of Kauai. I didn’t know this landscape existed until he posted about it, but apparently Waimea Canyon is called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. He starts his virtual tour at the ocean, and follows the canyon up to the mountain top. The part I find most interesting is his observation that like the Grand Canyon in Arizona (which he has also visited and photographed) he finds it difficult to capture the grandeur in most photos. Some clouds and a few rainbows helped him get good shots though!

a rainbow adds a splash of spectacular color to this photo of Waimea Canyon on Kauai in Hawaii
a rainbow in Waimea Canyon, called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific

Ben’s Angel: Painting and poem by Dorothy Berry-Lound

Hang on to your hats, folks. Dorothy Berry-Lound‘s virtual booth is a powerful one. She shows you the painting first, then tells the moving story behind the artwork. Then she finishes up with a poem to go with this powerful painting with a moving story … and wow. I don’t think very many people will be able to forget this one. I don’t want to drop spoilers, but when you click through, be prepared for this emotionally. This is about her last visit with a dying friend, Ben.

powerful painting Ben's Angel by Dorothy Berr-Lound
Ben’s Angel, painting by Dorothy Berry-Lound

Before you go

After browsing all these booths, I’d like to just remind you about my new idea for my email list: coloring pages drawn by me. It may seem frivolous after such a journey, but I like to say it’s the little things in life that end up mattering so much over time. I’ve decided to make the 15th of each month when I send out a new drawing y’all can print out and color, so tomorrow I will be figuring out the technical details to make this work. New email subscribers will get the current printable image once they confirm their email addresses. (Confirming your email address is an important anti-spam step that I require.)

I do hope everyone has enjoyed this month’s virtual art walk. Visit the other blogs, leave comments to let us know what you think and feel about the art, and sign up for an email list or five.

Award-winning artwork 2022 Creative Arts Festival

In the absence of an email congratulating me this year, I had assumed I did not win any places for my entries to this year’s VA regional healthcare system’s Creative Arts Festival. As of checking the post office box yesterday, I am happy to report that assumption is wrong. All three of my entries this year took either first or second place! Here is the breakdown of my award-winning artwork. Oh, and the medals in the images? Those were in the envelope, and now hang on the shelf next to my desk.

First place award watercolor painting

snapshot of the first place medal for the watercolor painting Pumpkin Close-Up with on-image caption and inset of artwork
the actual medal mailed to me, with the watercolor painting that won the award

For the second year in a row, I took first place in the watercolor division! Those of y’all reading last year recall I won the first place slot (and advancement to the national competition) with my Flamingo in Rippled Water. This year it is my Pumpkin Close-Up that moves up to national competition – and the original artwork is still available if you would like to hang it on your wall and boast you own a real “award-winning” painting. If the original 10 by 14 inches is just too small, you can order a fine art print large enough to fit most people’s walls at my Pixels store. Or, if you want to wear my art like my mother sister enjoy, check out the apparel options at my RedBubble store.

Second place award winning charcoal drawing

2nd place award winning artwork Two Flamingoes in monochromatic drawing division
Charcoal artwork Two Flamingoes won 2nd place award in monochromatic drawing

Last year, I took first place in the monochromatic drawing category with my white pencil on black paper Dew on a Calla Lily. This year, both Twitter and Facebook voted that I should enter this charcoal drawing of Two Flamingoes, and it took second place. Not bad, and it really IS an unexpected medium for this subject. Most people who draw or paint flamingoes will do so in color.

Want the original drawing to put on display as award-winning artwork? It’s a small 8 by 10 inches, so it will fit into small spaces if need be. If you have a need or strong desire to go BIG, you can always order a larger art print from Pixels. I don’t currently have it up at RedBubble, but may add it in if people ask.

Second place award in oil painting with an oil pastel

Now we get to the award I feel the most pride when I think about it. This would be taking “just” second place in the oil painting division – but with an oil pastel picture! Seriously. I figure the artists who invest in the materials for oil painting and the time involved (because it takes quite a while to dry!) do so when they are confident in their artist skill. Or maybe it’s just me who has hesitated so long. Going up against oil paint on canvas and still winning a medal with my oil pastel on paper feels good.

2nd place award winning artwork Book Reading By Candlelight oil pastel artwork
Book Reading By Candlelight, oil pastel artwork won 2nd place in the oil painting category

If you want the 11 by 14 inch original artwork, I recommend buying it sooner rather than later. My friend Keashia loves this piece, and will be debating anew whether she wants to buy it or not. Want a larger art print? Head to my Pixels shop for those (or a jigsaw puzzle). This image is definitely in my RedBubble shop for apparel and accessories.

Weekly email newsletter starting

If y’all have read down this far, you might as well fill in the little form at the bottom of this post for email subscription and a weekly newsletter (especially for those weeks I don’t get a new post finished!) that I will be sending out on Fridays. It’s been on my to-do list for months, but now it is in place!

Third virtual art walk this Friday

We’re having so much fun doing these virtual art walks, and will do another this weekend. I of course will be posting on Friday so I can do a new Feature Friday. We have at least one new artist playing, so check back in.

Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month

Yesterday was the first of October, but it didn’t really click for me until I ran into town to pick up some critter feed and saw a couple of businesses with the flocks of plastic pink flamingoes: October is breast cancer awareness month, and locally that means it’s time for Pink-Out Putnam again. Local participating businesses will not only decorate with the standard pink ribbons, but since this is Florida it means there will be a population explosion of those wonderfully tacky plastic pink flamingo yard ornaments.

Along with pink being one of my favorite colors to wear, and flamingoes being one of my favorite birds to paint, there is a darker personal connection for me. Both of my mom’s sisters and my dad’s surviving sister have all gone through breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Thankfully, all three are still alive to tell about it, but having women on both sides of my family get diagnosed leaves me at a higher risk of developing this myself. (For the record, my appointment for my next mammogram in early November. VA healthcare system takes this seriously.)

My pink flamingo watercolor series

Last year, I did a series of six watercolor paintings that featured flamingoes in or near water as part of an art challenge, which included my first place winning Flamingo in Rippled Water. I’ll be taking the series to various local businesses to see if any new small mom-and-pop places would like to display them.

Pink flower paintings

Pink flowers are also on my list of favorite things to paint, and I have some of those to share for this very pink post. I did a cherry blossom watercolor painting this spring, actually a little earlier than they bloomed, but it is very much an annual thing and I love to see photos and paintings of them in March. I also did two pink rose pieces last year: one in watercolor and one in oil pastel. Gathering up the links for this post made me realize I have not yet blogged one of my pink flower paintings yet …

Pink Hibiscus

Pink Hibiscus watercolor painting by Katrina Gunn
Pink Hibiscus, 10 x 10 inch watercolor painting, original available $100 USD

First things first: yes, if you look closely you can see the grid I used for sketching the proportions out properly. I had used a red watercolor pencil to do this, thinking when I painted over it would dissolve. It was a lesson learned. Not all pigments in watercolor pencils will disappear with regular application of water. I should note that this was the last time I did my grid-and-sketch directly on my watercolor paper. Now I sketch in one of my sketchbooks and use graphite transfer paper to make my marks on the watercolor paper. The punchline here is that people who see it don’t seem to care. Feedback on this paintings has always been quite positive despite the graphite outline and grid lines showing. I guess folks feel that shows this was painted by a person and not a software program.

Purchase info so you too may “Pink Out” like Putnam

Along with overlooking this piece here on the blog, I had also forgotten to upload it to my gallery over at Daily PaintWorks, which is the online venue where I prefer to sell my original artwork. This has been rectified. I had also forgotten to upload it to my RedBubble shop, but I fixed that as well now, so those of y’all who want your RB swag with this painting can have at it. Finally, for those who want an art print larger (or smaller) than the original 10 by 10 inches can order it at my Pixels shop.

So pick your favorite pink painting for Breast Cancer Awareness month. Please feel free to share this post, because this is an issue that has affected my family … and perhaps yours as well. My county will be decorated to the nines with pink ribbons, pink signs, and of course plastic pink flamingoes everywhere, and I invited everyone to join us! I have at least one new pink flamingo painting in my mind already, so stay tuned.

Pink flamingoes in watercolor

So, I intended to do up a flamingoes watercolor painting roundup when I noticed I only blogged about two of my six paintings last year. Oops! It’s high time I fix that, so grab a beverage and some popcorn (if you like popcorn and your husband hasn’t yet eaten it all) and let me get caught up on my favorite pink-feathered birds.

As I mentioned last year while it was happening, this was for a seven day challenge that had the theme of liquid. I naturally decided to use watercolor paint as my medium for the entire week, and picked out seven reference photos of flamingoes in or near water, and my Flapping Flamingo was the first one I painted. I fell behind on the blogging portion of the challenge, resurfacing to post my favorite of the series, Flamingo in Rippled Water, which y’all will recognize as one of the artworks that won first place in last autumn’s VA Healthcare system regional competition. When I finished up the challenge with a beachscape, I mentioned I would upload the others “soon.” I suppose less than a year can sort-of count as “soon,” in a certain light.

Very pink flamingo

For the second painting of the series, I did up this one I just call Wading Flamingo. I seriously doubt I will ever win any recognition for naming my art, but that doesn’t really bother me so I keep naming things with an obvious title. While this one isn’t really my favorite of the bunch, I have heard from a few folks who saw it and liked it. One artist also participating in the challenge said it was her favorite of the set. Like all the other flamingo paintings, this is on 9 by 12 inch watercolor paper, and prints are available. The page at my RedBubble swag shop is here.

Wading Flamingo watercolor painting
Wading Flamingo, 9 by 12 inch watercolor on paper, $100 USD available

Fun flamingo pose

Third in this series, and my second favorite overall, is this much more subdued version I call Curious Flamingo. My husband says flamingoes have such expressive faces, and that expression often looks startled, but I have found some nice ref photos where the bird looks not-startled, like this one. It still looks almost silly, the way this flamingo has cocked its head just so, but the overall effect with the less-saturated colors just work for me. Also on 9 by 12 inch watercolor paper, with prints available in larger sizes. Link to the RedBubble swag shop here.

Curious Flamingo watercolor painting
Curious Flamingo, 9 by 12 inch watercolor on paper, $100 USD available

Flamingoes on the beach

For my fourth flamingo watercolor painting, I managed to salvage something workable from what at the time looked like very much the disaster. After a couple days of touch-and-go, my masking fluid finally tore the (bleep) out of my paper. I was furious, went on Facebook and asked in a watercolor artists’ group for a better brand than what I was using. Once armed with a brand name that was recommended, I placed an order that very evening for what I now use, which is Pebeo drawing gum. As for the painting, which I was originally going to call Beachcombing Flamingoes but instead titled Impressionist Flamingoes … I totally intended for it to be done in an Impressionist style. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. I am still a bit ambivalent about the idea of selling the original due to the damage to the paper’s surface, but it scanned well and I uploaded it to RedBubble for apparel and accessories. Prints in various sizes are available.

Impressionist Flamingoes, was intended to be called Beachcombing Flamingoes
Impressionist Flamingoes, 9 by 12 inch watercolor

Pale flamingo

Pale Flamingo is as its title suggests, and a pale pink on the flamingo’s feathers while it feeds in shallow pale blue water. The black of the beak and tail feathers provides sharp contrast with all the pale versions of color, and this one was identified as another artist’s favorite of the series. The contrast is certainly eye-catching. The original is also on 9 by 12 inch watercolor paper, and prints are available from my Pixels store, while the RedBubble swag is located here.

Pale Flamingo watercolor painting
Pale Flamingo, 9 by 12 inch watercolor on paper, $100 USD available

So this gets me finally caught up on my flamingo series of watercolor paintings, which means it’s about time I painted and drew some new flamingo artwork. I’ll need to finish a few pieces on the easels – yes, I now have multiple easels to hold my works-in-progress – and one of those just happens to be a flamingo.

Feature Friday 2: Florida wild flowers

Another quiet week on my blog reader, but April can be a busy time of the year. Just a couple links to share, then I will inflict my personal (ahem) “style” of photography on y’all, because I had ample opportunity to whip out the little digicam yesterday on our trip in to the feed store, and there are so many pretty wildflowers blooming around my little rural corner of our county.

But first, some real photography from Deb Beausoliel who blogs at Beautiful Sun, a translation of her family name. Her topic (after a big fall last month) is sunrises, which being a morning person she prefers over sunsets just because she has them mostly to herself. Now, as a painter who wields brush and pencil instead of camera, I can say with all certainty that capturing a sunrise or sunset is mostly the domain of photographers, unless a painter has an almost-photographic visual memory or such an encompassing grasp of light and shadow to work from imagination. I probably could not even make a mess with my soft pastels fast enough to capture the perfect moment of optimal color in the sky and how the light hits the surrounding land without the light shifting before I could get it on paper. When I do a sunrise or sunset work, I use a reference photo to “hold” the light still so I can work out the perfect colors and get the surrounding landscape shadows correct. Photos may not always capture what the eye sees, but it can get it close enough when a photographer knows what she or he is doing – and I can definitely work with that.

Local Florida wildflowers

As fun as a skyscape or cloudscape or sunrise/set picture can be, right now my inspiration is a lot more down-to-earth: there is a new series of wildflowers blooming around the property and along the sides of the roads on the way into town, and I do not really know what they are called, and Google image search has been not-exactly helpful. Apparently, I need to upload the snapshots online before I can use Google Lens, since I do not own a touchscreen device. As my son used to say back when he was in high school, “Le sigh.” These are likely called weeds by the local population, but I still want to figure out what they are so I can title drawings and paintings with a little more detail than, “pretty flowering weed in my Florida yard.” Here is the one I tried to look up on Google, which gave me two different names depending on which photo I used, and both names were genus names with almost 500 species each, so between my two attempts to identify this plant I have over 900 possibilities.

medium blue-violet trumpet-shaped wild flower here in Florida, called the Carolina wild petunia
delicate blue-violet to lavender flowers, approximately an inch in diameter, now identified as Carolina wild petunia

When hubby took a snapshot of one of these plants from above to get the five-lobed shape as the focus, Google first tried to say it was in the campanula genus, commonly called bellflower. The problem with that is in the above snapshot I took this morning, which clearly shows the flowers having a trumpet shape, not bell. The above snapshot returned gentian genus as its result, and while it does look similar, all the online sources for gentians say they bloom usually September to December, except one species which has the common name spring gentian but doesn’t look like this. Perhaps I should only use the digicam for reference photos, and try to identify local flowers after I’ve drawn and/or painted them in a botanical style?

Update: This has been identified as Carolina wild petunia, which is native to most of the southeastern US.

The other flowers I really want to draw and paint are along the paved county road heading back from town. Yesterday, with critter food in the truck bed, and Mexican food in the cab with us, I persuaded hubby to pull off the road for a couple minutes to snap some photos of these lovely fuchsia colored flowers:

bright fuchsia-pink wild phlox
eye-catching small fuchsia colored flowers, identified as a wild phlox species native to Florida

There were actually a couple other variations of this flower all around me: one variation had white in the center instead of a darker fuchsia, and another had the lighter color as the middle with the darker as the outer color. These flowers are a little smaller than an inch in diameter, and I had the worst time seeing the screen on the digicam just because it was sunny and bright. I didn’t spend too much time with it, because our lunch from the little family run Mexican restaurant smelled delicious (and it was) and I knew hubby’s stomach was growling.

Update: These bright pink wildflowers are a native wild phlox species, with the natural variety.

A pair of peahens wandering around

Finally, the reason I pulled out my digicam at the feed store for the second week in a row (remember the gorgeous purple morning glory blooms last week?) is right here:

a pair of peahens walking around a parking lot
a pair of peahens hanging around the feed store
a pair of peahens, perhaps a bit camera-shy as they walk away when the camera comes out
they must be camera shy peahens, as they went out the door and around the building when they heard the digicam turn on

The employees and owner of the feed store had been putting a little bit of scratch out for them, and since it was a lovely mild day the doors were propped open and the two peahens actually walked into the store, but turned and immediately left when they heard my digicam turn on. I remarked it was a bit of a shame, because with the backlighting from the door I could see the iridescent blue of their neck and shoulder feathers so nicely. On the drive though town from the feed store, while I was looking at the digicam’s screen, hubby commented, “And there is the peacock,” but traffic was moving too fast for me to try to snap a pic of him. Ah well, there are plenty of photos of peacocks on the various royalty-free stock photo sites, but finding photos of the peahens is not as easy, and I’ve been thinking of doing another peafowl painting sometime this summer to go with my Peacock Portrait acrylic sketch from last year.

We did go get our new goat on Monday, and are once again on kidding watch as she is due soon, which means I’ll get to do the whole bottle-feeding a baby goat routine again. The bright side to this is I now have tinted charcoal to use for my drawings, so here’s hoping I can get some good cat-free drawing time. Maybe I’ll even be able to identify these wildflowers (or flowering weeds) I have blooming around me this week.