Cherry blossoms

 

On Friday I left work a few minutes early and headed down to the Tidal Basin to check out the peak bloom cherry blossoms on a beautiful, blue skies kind of day.  DC is at its loveliest in the spring, even when spring comes early.

  

[Dear Illustration Friday visitors:  you're probably wondering what the "swamp" connection is. Legend has it that our nation's capital was built on a swamp.  Not quite true, but there were wetlands involved, and it gets awfully humid in the summer.]

Testing out pastel colors!

A Glimpse (or Klimt!) into the Past

My cousin Emma is almost exactly ten years younger than me and is now studying art at my alma mater (what up, University of Dayton!)  Ten years isn't all that long in the world of higher education, and so in a lot of ways, Emma is following in my artistic footsteps:  taking the same classes, often with the same instructors, and even sometimes doing the same projects.  Today, she was treated to these two preliminary paintings I did way back in my Painting I class my junior year of college:

The project, if I remember correctly, was to do a self-portrait in the style of a master portraitist from art history.  My choice:  Gustav Klimt.  In preparation, we created these two paintings:  a representation of one of our chosen artist's portraits, and a detail of our own portraits.  

Talk about a blast from the past!  I hadn't thought about these paintings in years.  I'm heading home to Cincinnati to visit my parents in a few weeks and now want to dig up and photograph the final painting I did for this project, a full-body portrait with lots of bright, smeary, patterny colors and only the face and hands in precise detail.  I also want to start doing more bright, smeary, patterny colors in my pastel drawings sometime soon.

Thanks to Emma for sharing this.  

Energy Hog Art - finished!

Final art for the Energy Hog coloring book project for the Alliance to Save Energy.  Can't wait to see these images in the final product!  (Which will include their text on how kids can save energy.  The captions here are my own short explanations.)  I've very much enjoyed working on this project and hope kids enjoy coloring them and learning about practical ways to save energy and live a little more sustainably and earth-friendly.

Energy Hogs are things that take more energy than they need.

You can find them all over the house...

Keep the refrigerator door closed whenever possible.

Turn off the water while you brush your teeth.

Turn off the light switch when you leave a room.

Turn off electronics like video games, TVs, and computers when you're not using them.

CFL light bulbs save energy--so they're not Energy Hogs!

If you find the Energy Hogs in your own house, you can save energy, too!