This is Spring

Voting ends tonight at 11:59pm EST for the Morning Call Best of Blogs contest. Thanks to everyone who has voted! I have moved up from 7th to 3rd!
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I thought today I would share some pictures of Spring in my neighborhood just so you could see why I am still looking for pictures of Spring in other places.

Ten days ago Spring looked like this...

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

Buds were getting ready to burst open.

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

The early blooming flowers were spreading.The day was warm and sunny and the temperature hit a high of 70F. It was warm enough that I was able to ride around in the convertible with the top down and the heated seats off! I was loving it!

Three days later I woke up to this. It took me totally by surprise.

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

Two mornings after that I looked outside to find even more! Yikes!

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

At least snow in March is a temporary thing. And it is mostly all gone (again). Our temperatures are still hanging out about five to ten degrees below normal and are predicted to stay there for the next few days. Hopefully once we get through that Spring will be here to stay.

By the way, my mom says we should have expected this since March came in like a lamb, which means it will go out like a lion. That has me thinking - Bring on April! ......On the other hand, I'm a sunshine girl so I'm not real fond of April showers...

Spring in Wheeling, West Virginia

Photo of iris

©2011 Leslie Nutting

This beautiful flower photograph was sent to me by Leslie Nutting. According to Leslie this is an early type of iris which is very small and blooms when the snowdrops do. Who knew? Not me. So in addition to helping me hold on until Spring arrives and sticks around in my neighborhood, this project is also teaching me new things.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that I like to rush Spring. I want it to arrive as early as possible.

Of course, I actually have no influence on when Spring gets to town. Shocking, I know.

But I fool myself into thinking I do by planting early blooming flowers. First I planted daffodils. Then some crocuses. Last year a friend kindly gave me some snowdrops and winter aconites from her yard.

I'll give you three guesses to what flower I'll be looking to plant next. Oh yes, it will be the early iris. And I'll have Leslie to thank!

Leslie is an artist. She paints contemporary portraits, figures and landscapes. I especially love her figure paintings as they are full of emotion. If you'd like to check them out, her links are below.

Leslie Nutting Website
Leslie Nutting Facebook Fan Page

Spring in Vancouver, Canada

Photo of purple crocuses

©2011 Mary Jane Muir

Spring must have peeked in on Vancouver, Canada for a day or two because that is where my friend Mary Jane saw these beauties blooming. Have I ever mentioned that my favorite flower color is yellow? And purple is a close second. So you can bet I loved finding these pictures in my inbox.

Photo of yellow crocuses

©2011 Mary Jane Muir

I love how the yellow crocuses are all snuggled in among the daffodil leaves. They look so cozy.

Mary Jane is an illustrator and published author. She shares her colorful art and illustrations on her two blogs...
Painting Puppies
Maple Pancakes

If you have a moment, why don't you hop on over to check them out? I think you will like what you see.

Spring in Rome

Spring near Rome, Italy

photo ©2011 Kelly Medford

Kelly Medford was the first to send me a photo which showed evidence of the approaching Spring season. Thank you Kelly!

Kelly lives in Rome, Italy and carries her easel wherever she goes. Painting in plein air allows her to combine her love of being outdoors with her love of creating art. Her photo is from a recent hiking trip. Look carefully and you can see the green buds of leaves starting to unfurl and white blossoms.

When you get a chance, please check out the links below. Kelly's beautiful landscapes will brighten your day even if Spring hasn't showed up in your neighborhood yet.

Kelly Medford -
Website
Blog - Adventures in Painting
Facebook Page

Also if you have photographic evidence of Spring arriving near you, email me your photo and I'll share it here on my blog. Check out this post for details.

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On a separate topic, I have entered my blog into a "Best of Blogs" contest being run by the local newspaper. If you enjoy reading my blog, please consider voting for me here. You do not need to live in my area to vote, but you will need to register for the site. Voters may vote once a day in each of the categories. Voting ends at 11:59pm on March 27th.

Wish me luck! And thank you for voting!

Spring is on the Way... sort of

Photo - winter aconite

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

This is my first year growing these early bloomers.

Seeing flowers growing in March makes me very happy!

Last week our snow finally melted. We've had a handful of days where the high temperatures were in the 40s. A few days it might have touched 50. And rumor has it that one day there was a record high of 67 degrees! I happened to be away on vacation that day though so I can't confirm the rumor.

Once the temperatures start becoming bearable I love to take a tour of my yard and look for green leaves poking their way through the dirt.

Photo - Leaves of mini daffodils

©Stacy L. Rowan

The monotone colors of winter are not very inspiring to me, but the new growth of Spring always gets the creative juices growing.

Of course where I live Spring is a fickle character. The day after the record high of 67, the temperatures dropped back to the mid 30s. Two days later it snowed.

Some years Spring can tease us for two months or more before arriving in all her glory. All the teasing is rather frustrating to me.

Photo - Snowdrops

©2011 Stacy L. Rowan

Also my first year growing these.

A kind friend gave me snowdrops and aconite from her garden last year.

I've been hearing stories of Spring arriving to stay in other locations and I had an idea of how you could help me bear my end of winter frustrations.

Email me* pictures of what Spring is doing in your corner of the world. I will share the pictures here for all of my readers to enjoy. I will also choose the picture that inspires me the most, do a small sketch of it and mail the sketch to the person who provided the photo.

That way I will have Spring on my blog, even if I don't have it in my neighborhood.

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* The fine details:
Email pictures to my email address located on the right hand side of the blog. Please make sure you own the copyright to the photo you are sending. Also please resize the photo to be web ready before sending (72ppi, max dimension 500pixels).

Please provide a link to your blog or website, if you have one, so I can post it along with your photo. A blog or website is not required to participate. But if you have one I'd like to share some link love. :)

I realize that only half of the world is heading into Spring. Those of you living in the southern hemisphere can play along by sending photos of what Autumn is doing. I don't discriminate against any of the colorful seasons.

My current plan is to post photos once or twice a week. Thanks for playing along!

Happy Halloween!

"Jack is a Night Pumpkin"

©2009 Stacy L. Rowan

Here’s hoping that the ghosts, ghouls and goblins bring you the treat of creative inspiration… or at the very least a LOT of chocolate!


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This jack-o-lantern was designed by my little ghouls. They used the night sky as inspiration choosing a half moon shape for the eyes, a star for the nose and vampire style teeth (from all those bats that fly at night) for the mouth. Kids having a design inspiration for a jack-o-lantern -- it’s enough to make a mom tear up.

Vultures

Today was a lovely autumn day - sunny skies, temperatures hovering around 70 degrees, leaves starting to change. I decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a walk around my neighborhood. I took my camera with me with the intention of capturing images of fall in my neighborhood. I imagined pictures of colorful leaves and mums in bloom. I never imaged this...

Best I can tell, this is a turkey vulture. He was hanging out in the top of my neighbor's tree. He doesn't look like much here, but let me assure you that when he took off in flight...

he was HUGE! At first there were just two, but later there were as many as six flying around.

I found myself hoping that they weren't very hungry. I felt a little outnumbered. The other birds in the neighborhood didn't seem very happy to have the turkey vultures around and were making quite a lot of noise. The vultures didn't seem to care as they slowly glided on the air currents.

I'm not sure where the vultures came from, because I promise they are not a common sight in our suburban development. I do know that they are on the list of birds which can be seen at near-by Hawk Mountain. According to their website 40 turkey vultures were counted there today and a comment was posted that said "turkey vultures on the move today". I guess that's as good an explanation for my sighting as any.

I did manage to get images of colorful leaves and fall mums as I expected, but they seemed a little sedate compared to these.

Art Blog Search

Another short post because I wanted to share the ArtistBlogSearch which I first saw on James Gurney's blog. It is a Google custom search which searches "the best artists' blogs while eliminating splogs and inactive blogs that clog the results on most search engines." I tried out a few searches and came up with results for a lot of blogs I already read and others that seem worth checking out. It seemed to return more pertinent results than a standard google search. I think it could be a good resource for art collectors searching for works in a specific medium or style or with a specific subject. And of course it is good for artists looking for information on art topics.

I also used it to check some search terms that I want to lead to my blog. It was an eye-opening experiment! I found I have work to do on several of my search terms.

Why don't you go have a play with it, then come back and tell me what you think. Do you see value in having a separate search engine for artist blogs? Do you think collectors will use it or only other artists? Did the search terms you want people to find you with actually lead to your blog? If so, can you give me some pointers?

About the photo: It is time for the American Cancer Society Daffodil Days again and I was happy to get my annual gift of daffodils from my husband. Of course I couldn't resist taking some pictures. I love the reflection in this one.

Interesting Reads

copyright 2007 Stacy L. Rowan

My archives list in the right column shows me that my postings for July have been few and far between. What can I say? Summer has a way of pulling me away from both the computer and the studio. I want to be at the pool and the farmers market and enjoying the outdoors. I want to go swimming and get lost in a book and ride bikes and go on walks with my kids. Of course, come the end of next month when my shows start I will be paying for my fun in the sun, but right now it seems like a decent trade.

Although I haven't been writing much, I have read some good blog posts lately. I thought I would share them with you just in case you missed them.

Maggie over at Greywaren Art wrote two posts on the topic of being consistent in style. They can be found here and here. I'll be pondering her words as I soak up the sun. Hopefully the sun's bright rays will help me see clearly what my "cookies" should be.

Katherine on Making a Mark has also been putting up some thought provoking posts. This week she started reviewing Imagekind, an online print on demand service. Her first post was a brief introduction to Imagekind, and in the second post she really starts to delve into the details.

Now, just to prove that I've been doing more than just reading...

Earlier this month, Katherine also posted information on how to make a light box for still life photography. The information originally came from the knowledgeable folks at Strobist. I followed Katherine's link to the original directions and I am happy to say that I now have my very own light box!! It was so easy to make and fun to play with. The picture above of the pepper was the first picture I took in my new light box. (Isn't that a beautiful pepper? I didn't even know purple peppers existed until my trip to the farmer's market last week. It tastes like a regular green bell pepper, but looks so pretty in a salad. I'm planning on buying more, so watch for them to turn up in my salads and my artwork!)

After testing the light box in the set-up that Strobist had described, I decided to play with different colored lighting. I had some sheets of colored translucent paper that I bought in the scrapbooking section of the local craft store. They cost about 80 cents each and worked well for this experiment. For this picture of the teacup, I slipped a light blue sheet between the light source and the box. I also put an orange sheet standing up inside the box on the shadow side of the cup. Can you see the two colors reflected in the cup?

2007 copyright Stacy L. Rowan

I also tried the opposite set up with the orange between the light source and the cup and the blue on the shadow side. Unfortunately the orange is a little dark, so that picture didn't work as well. I plan to go back and buy a yellow sheet and try again.

So you see, I am doing some things. Sure they may seem more like playing than work, but isn't that what summer is all about?