Silly Chickens

I recently was feeling the need to re-purpose some wimpy old watercolors, so I dug into the "recycle" stash and covered a couple with gesso, then felt free to play.  This started out with lots of layers of yellow ochre, nickle gold, some blue stenciling and I don't know what all. Then I used vine charcoal to draw the birds, fixed that, then layered some thin veils of white over the top, and added some splashes of red.

Fun.

11x14 inches, acrylic on paper

Photos from Italy - Much Later

What has come over me? I seem unable to do anything except work outdoors, all messy, sweaty, hard things like digging out creeping bellflower from the perennial beds, or scrubbing, scraping and repainting the deck, or hauling around bags of mulch.  Thing is, here in beautiful southern Wisconsin the summer season isn't all that long, and if these things do not get done fairly soon, there is really no point in doing them at all.

I'm looking at all of this as good healthy exercise, then swallowing some ibuprofen.

Anyway, these are some of my nicest photos from our April cruise.  I'm not even bothering to identify them, since all these lovely stops have run together in my memory. We visited Sardinia, Sicily, Rome and the Vatican, and Camogli and some other villages on the Italian Rivera.  It was sunny and warm, and already seems like a dream.