Watercolor journals of a week

Speed

Meeting daily prompts for #worldwatercolormonth are challenges, and result in mostly smaller, 5 x 7, works, done fairly quickly. I year now to take longer on a piece, so that is stewing, but without answers.

This week's prompts: Casting Shadows, City Life, In the Jungle, Rainy Days, Wet and Dry. All are 5 x 7, 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper.

And I added an additional more abstract one of a roadrunner, actually one of my favorite so far. So, after 20 days in July, I've done at least 21 or 2. Some are good, and cheery and others are not. Life.

Casting Shadows

Shadows--I stay away from politics in my blog and painting, for the most part, but anger and alarm at a president being a lap dog for a Russian dictator provoked the Casting Shadows of fascism across America. Art is supposed to matter, and this was inspired by attending the Woody Guthrie festival Saturday...a fighter of fascism indeed.

OKC dawn

City life was difficult because I generally don't like cities, but this version of a card for Susan's nephew fit. 

Heart of Darkness

Jungle took me to who old friends and students know is my favorite novelist and novel, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a copy always in my office: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on earth.... An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest....The ...waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom....”

Cabin Fever

• Rainy Days was almost a failure, but I thought about cabin fever. I'm cooped up in the city traffic, but not in my cabin, with books, cats, paint, a fire and company. I am always ready for a cabin, good cabin fever. 

Wet and dry--What is wetter and dryer than a good martini. Dorothy Parker and a martini.-“I’d love a martini, two at the most, three I’m under the table, four, I’m under the host” 

Watercolor stories

"Moonlight"

Paintings should hint at stories, I've heard, and I'm finding that most paintings have stories.
July's #WorldWatercolorMonth daily challenges are provoking stories of my own as I try to match emotion and craft with the subjects.

"Yum"

The most recent prompts were Forest Animals, Fast & loose, Sweet Treats, and On the Beach. All are 5 by 7, 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper.
Here they are, with a second, more impressionistic one of the roadrunner done today, just for fun. I'm perhaps most pleased with this one so far. It makes up for the failure I had on mountains, so there is still one a day.
That is the key, having fun, trying new things. 
I still have a long way to go on figures, but how better to practice than on a long-legged brunette in a bikini? 

"Red Hat"

Stories, I told you--unicorns, roadrunners, snow cones, and beauties. 
Tomorrow may be a little different, more abstract or impressionistic--wonder what the story will be on "Casting Shadows"?

"Beep, beep"

"Speed"

A two roadrunner, back road kind of day

Finding yourself on the back roads, wizened, gnarled, shaped by the years...a survivor

Cooped up from work, routine, city traffic, mild winter blahs. Sunshine, south breeze, open the windows,  get out of the house. Cold front coming.

Time flows past on the back roads

Coffee cup in the holder. Camera phone ready. Not much color out there. Oklahoma drought, mental drought. Roll down the car windows, open the sun roof, turn off radio and turn on thoughts and imagination, head for the back roads northeast of town.
Too many fancy new no-individuality Dallas-Style houses and elaborate gates going up everywhere in the rolling cross-timbered hills, but the farther you go, the narrower the roads, the more house trailers, frame homes. 
The traffic and the noise disappear. You can stop on the edge of the road, get out and take a photo or two, and nary a car goes by. Only the sound of the breeze, the birds.

"When peace like a river..."

On one corner, a roadrunner pauses in mid-pavement, hears the car engine, and gingerly heads off into  the underbrush. The other way up a gravel road, another one skitters across the road.
Good omens, you think, and keep going, finding more of yourself. 
Out of coffee and area roads not yet explored, you find old US 66 ahead. First noises are the motorcycles out on this day, cruising the mother road. The transition back to city life.
Refreshed, it's a two roadrunner, back road kind of day.

Where greening wheat, grazing cattle are the only traffic