Four and 20

I finally found some time to do a page for my art journal. The prompt for this week is "birds" and that is a subject I love. I'd seen a plate on the wall in a photo in an English home and garden magazine that had crows (or maybe blackbirds?) and pears on a big round charger. It was hung over an Aga, which is probably why I picked out this tiny little detail in a rather wide angle photo of a kitchen. (Cool kitchen, by the way....very English and very cool.) I really liked the charger and wished I had one. It occurred to me....duh.....that painting ceramic bisque is a skill I have mastered to some degree, and this was a project clearly within my abilities. I don't have a big charger or a platter or even a plate that was large enough for the design I visualized, so I went over to the local contemporary ceramic studio and found just what I wanted. It's a long, rectangular platter and would look well hung on the wall over the arch to the breakfast room here in Edmonds or it would look equally nice up at Grant Creek, somewhere near my Aga. I worked out a design of three crows, loosely based on the birds in the photo (what I could see of them....very small in the photo and a big glare off the plate, hiding about a quarter of the design). I like my birdies. They are sort of cool and they march along the platter, looking very crow-ish. I painted it and then used sgraffito to add some detail. The platter should be fired and ready to pick up on Tuesday. (I feel rather like I'm hauling coals to Newcastle here, but I didn't have the bisque blank and I don't want to fire the kiln for one platter!) Since I had these nice crows all drawn out, I decided this evening to do a page for the art journal using the same birds. I like how it turned out. My pages are certainly different from the style of the others in my art journal group, but I am getting some good technique ideas from them and their pages, and factoring it through my own working style. Can't say if anyone else cares for my pages, but some of them are pleasing me and some of them were failures but all of them were fun to do. And that's the point.

The garden is lush and lovely right now. Full of weeds, too, but the rhodies are blooming and the hostas are huge and green and the pots on the patio are full of blooms of all color, so they weeds go unnoticed...I hope. The white clematis in the back garden is blooming like crazy and the flowers are nearly as large as a dinner plate. They take my breath away. Both the cats are spending most of each day outside, unless it's raining. Then they sit inside and look out the patio door. They do like their deck time in the sun. Lazy sods.

Tomorrow I have to work the Market from 9 to noon. This is another drive to sign up new volunteers for the Festival. I hope everyone who signed up to work shows up. I am only going to do the first shift and then I'm off to Grant Creek for the remainder of the Memorial Day Weekend. Nonie is joining me up there tomorrow mid-afternoon, so I hope not to get held up in town. I do have to stop and do the grocery shopping, so that's more time before I get to my snug little place overlooking the Stilly. I yearn to be there now. Patience is hard. Very hard!