TWO FOR JOY

With the coming of frosty mornings it takes a little extra resolve to leave a warm bed for an early morning walk.

 Still, I was up and on my way long before the sun decided to climb over the Grand Teton Mountains along the Wyoming-Idaho border.

 When I walked along the path by the golf course near the airport my shadow was wonderfully tall and long legged.

 The trees are putting on their fall foliage but haven’t dropped many leaves yet.

Black billed magpies are a common sight around here.  Usually they are spooked of cameras and are a challenge to photograph.

 However, I caught these two working on a duet of sorts.  Mostly magpies aren’t much for singing.  They give warning calls and the young ones create quite a racket when they want to be fed.

 I think this may be a couple of parents celebrating their empty nest and a bit of free time now that the kids have left home.

 I got in a few more photos before they spotted me and took off with a flash of white wings and flit of long tail feathers.

When I was a kid we had a jump rope rhyme about magpies.

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy,

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret,

Never to be told,

Eight for a wish

Nine for a kiss

Ten for a bird

You must not miss.

O-U-T jump out!

Do kids even jump rope on the playground anymore?

MOON LOONY

There’s not a lot to like about being at the point in life when one’s body refuses to sleep more than five or six hours without a trip to the loo.

But when I got up at around four-dark-thirty there was an early morning lunar eclipse going on.

I guess this is known as a “Blood Moon” from the reddish shadow caused by the earth’s atmosphere. It’s the same thing that causes a red sunset but it seems more spooky.

When I went for a morning walk a few hours later the moon had turned back to its normal color. Kids on the way to school were unimpressed.

I was the only one getting all loony about the big round thing in the sky.

The rest of the world was just going about their day.

PAINTING THE PORCH

One of the reasons I like working with watercolor is the juicy and dramatic effects which can come from floating pigment across wet paper. I found a series of internet tutorials by Linda Baker using a technique of pouring and splashing that really made the process fun. I used a photo I’d taken of our front porch as a reference, worked it into a sketch, decided where the darks and lights would be and transferred the outlines to a piece of watercolor paper.

I used masking fluid to cover the areas I wanted to remain the color of the white paper and then dropped in the primary colors of red, yellow and blue on the rest.

When the paper was completely dry, I again masked out everything I wanted to stay a light shadow and added more color to the remaining painting.

The process is repeated again with more mask on the middle darks and more paint.

This time I used mostly blue to cover the areas not masked out.

Finally I added a dark blue, with a few areas of red and a bit of yellow, to the deepest shadow areas. I let it dry overnight, peeled off the masking and added in the details for the final painting.

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