Cleaning The Clutter Of My Life......Plus Some Art Card Designs

 Before I get to the clutter part of my life, I did make a couple of new art cards a while back.  The "Butterfly Garden" card above was created from the original painting below (with Chris's help cropping and sizing everything).  I'm very happy with the way this one turned out.

Chris had to do a bit more work on the "Bearded Iris Garden" card because the original painting below was a big square and he was trying to change the shape while keeping as much of the main subject as possible.  I would love to get these art cards (including all that I did before this) photographed and onto ETSY but I just don't think that is going to happen at this point.  Seems like too much to get done for now and this kind of thing can wait until the upcoming months.

With just over 2 months until we leave West Point, I have some clutter and garbage to remove from my life.  For me, the worst possible thing would be to not bother with it now and have the movers pack all my trash, with me having to throw it all away when I get to Orlando.  I'm trying to avoid that so I've been working in my messy studio above to go through everything, recycle what I can, throw away what I don't need and just organize what I'm taking with me to make it easier to pack.  I tackled the messiest part of the room this week, the area to the left of my desk that is actually not in this photo.  It is all clean, organized and ready to go....I was able to get rid of a ton of junk from this area.  Going through everything I found things I hadn't seen in years, things I wondered why I didn't throw away long ago and many items that gave me the "so that is where it has been all this time" moment.

Dudley of course kept me company through the whole thing and I think was standing there in awe of my finally having done the stuff I should have done a long time ago.  He by the way offered no help with this task what so ever but did stop long enough to pose for the camera.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Imagine my surprise this year when I realized I had a Lilac bush in the yard. When we moved up the street to where we are now, it was June of last year and the Lilacs had long stopped blooming. I was really thrilled to discover this bush and needless to say, I've been out smelling the Lilacs quite a bit.

I was also able to get some really good, close up photos of them that I will store away for possible use on a future painting.

Other exciting things are of course happening in the garden as well. This is a photo of my deep purple Clematis getting ready to bloom. I have 3 in my back garden, dark purple, lavender and white. They all have lots of blooms so I'm looking forward to them opening up.

Another favorite....a serious favorite of mine, are my bearded Iris's. I have purple and the most beautiful pink. They should also be blooming any time now and I'll post more photos again when they open up.

Enjoy Spring and the beautiful weather.

Spring Irises

Now that it seems spring is springing around here, it gets me thinking about some of my favorite flowers. Well, if you know me, you know I have lots of favorites but this particular one is a spring bloom. I really love my Iris collection. Every May, it is one of the things I look forward to with great anticipation.

The top photo is a watercolor I was inspired to paint 2 years ago by all the ongoing photos I seem to take each year of my collection. Simply enough, I called it "Spring Irises." This piece is a 23" x 9" watercolor on coldpress paper. The original sold but I have made prints. In fact the day after it sold, I went into a panic because believe me, as much as I was happy to sell it, very happy, I would miss it hanging on my own wall. My husband quickly got to work taking a good quality photo of it so I would be able to make prints. I now have one for myself and also, offer them for sale on my website.

So these are some photos I've taken of my Iris garden in bloom. I have a lot of them as you can see and sometimes get as many as 5 blooms from one plant. It makes for good picture taking anyway.

When I was creating the painting, I used a bunch of these actually, to get my drawing done. I rarely use just one photo of a subject, I prefer to mix and match different things, in this case flowers, from the different photos to get my painting. The top photo was the one I used the most.