Happy Thanksgiving and a Sale

I want to wish a 'Happy Thanksgiving' to all of my friends and customers who are celebrating today in the United States. I hope you have a lovely day with family and friends.

I hand-lettered this message this morning in watercolour and then surrounded it with some of the nature finds I have in my studio. I wrote the words in pencil, fleshed out the letters and then filled them with watercolour.

In Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving in the month of October! It's always on the second Monday in October. I've always been a little jealous of the American tradition as I feel you have a more formal beginning to the holiday season. In Canada, there's a very long gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas and I never feel quite ready. Meeko's ready for the holidays though. He told me so.

I've been busy this month although I haven't been posting here on my blog very often. If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you will have seen that I've been working on a new series of flower paintings. I will be working at creating prints of them in the next few days. If I have time, I am also hoping to include them in a special project.  I'll let you know.

I also wanted to mention that I am having a holiday sale in my art shop. You can get 20% off, now through Monday, November 30th. Just use the coupon code SHOP2015 at checkout.

❤  ❤  ❤  ❤  ❤

Ladybugs, Gardening, HTML and Change

I feel a bit like this ladybug right now--about to spread my wings and take flight. I have been working very hard the past week on my own website. I opened a shop on Big Cartel in January. It was nice but it felt limited. I decided recently to move to Shopify. I have been able build a website there that is much more dynamic and beautiful and I can't wait to show it to you!

I am feeling positively nerdy with my newfound HTML skills. The internet is wonderful. You get stuck and a google search can help you out. Stubbornness helps. Curiosity is a motivator. For particularly puzzling problems, I turned to my two savvy daughters and a talented friend. Figuring out how to make HTML work for you is the closest thing I can think of to reading a mystery novel. The answer is there somewhere. You just have to find it.

For now, the shop links to the right will take you to a page letting you know that my website is under construction. I will post here and on Instagram and Facebook when I open it up. It will be sometime in the next few days.

I have been freshening my products listings for my new website so have been going through my very disorganized photo files this weekend (on my hard drive, memory cards and external drives). I found this fabulous photo today of a ladybug on my paint palette. It was taken two summers ago when I was painting outside at my parents' house in Muskoka. My mom and dad are in the process of moving from their year-round lakeside residence of almost twenty years (and the family cottage of about 35 years) to a new home in town. Lots of changes.

A couple of weeks ago, I took some new photos of my ladybug print. I did the original painting over 20 years ago and it is still one of my favourite watercolours. I have held on to the original. The print looks so much like it!

This gardening season, I have commited to redoing some of my product photography when the corresponding flowers are available in the garden. I love the combination of my paintings and prints with their real-life inspiration. 

Ladybugs, gardening, HTML and change. What my June is made of.

Ladybug art print ©Kathleen Maunder (Trowel and Paintbrush)

❤  ❤  ❤  ❤  ❤

A Giveaway!

Hello, my friends. I am starting to feel the holiday spirit and am having a giveaway on Instagram. I wanted to be sure that you knew about it! You could win a nature collection print, a 'Celebrate Simple Things' card and gift tag and a set of recipe cards--all featuring my watercolours. Check out my post on Instagram for how to enter. It's simple. Click here.

I will be choosing the winner on Tuesday, December 9th at 9:00 a.m. EST.

❤  ❤  ❤  ❤  ❤

An October Baby

Last week I worked on a special painting. My friend Sarah had her first baby in October. I decided to create a painting with the baby's name and birth flowers as a gift.

I looked up October's flower and some sources said cosmos and others said marigold. So what did I do? I included both of them!

First I hand wrote the baby's names lightly in pencil: Isabel Winona. Aren't those pretty names? Then I widened the letters and filled them in with watercolour.

I surrounded the names with three each of cosmos and marigold flowers as well as some leaves, stems and a little heart. I worked on it over a period of three days. It was hard not to publish photos of it right when I finished it but I needed to keep it a secret. I mailed the painting last week and Sarah told me it arrived safely in yesterday's mail.

I had a moment of panic after I had put it in the mail. I found a piece of paper in my studio on which I had been sketching some initial ideas. On it, I had written both Isabel and Isobel. (Why? I don't know. It must have been a moment's inattention.) All of a sudden, I was terrified that I might have misspelled Isabel's name on the actual painting! I raced to the photos I had taken before mailing it and was very relieved to see that the painting said Isabel.

Here's my finished painting for a beautiful little girl and her happy parents, Sarah and Dan. ❤

A Bittersweet Gift from Nature

This past week, I received a bittersweet gift. In the winter months, Meeko and I walk almost every day on the little forest path not far from our house. At this point in the winter, the scenery is quite familiar and predictable: snow, tree trunks and shadows. I love it but there aren't many dramatic changes from day to day. We know what we are going to see at each curve of the pathway. One day last week, Meeko hesitated beside one snow bank and it made me glance over. Scattered over the snow were the most beautiful spotted feathers.

It didn't take too long to figure out that what we were witnessing was the aftermath of the tragic end of a woodpecker, most likely a Downy Woodpecker, although all that was left were feathers. I am squeamish about injury and death and hate to know that any creature has perished.

I need to tell you a story. One day a couple of years ago, I looked outside into our backyard and saw a hawk sitting in one of our trees. Our trees are still relatively small so it was a pretty impressive sight. He had a sparrow in its beak. I have been known to walk out into the backyard and announce to the birds (I'm usually talking to the blue jays in springtime) that there will be no murders in my backyard. I was horrified in this case to see that I was too late to do anything. I have to say that my reaction moved from horror to respect over the course of the very long time that he was there. This was not sport. There was no waste. This was his food.

So this week on the forest path, I respected the fact that most likely another hawk had had its lunch and I had ended up with the most beautiful subjects for a new painting. Meeko was very patient as I trudged through the snow trying to gather as many as I could. Do you look at nature sometimes and think 'How could this be so beautiful?' Me too. The markings on these feathers are exquisite. It's the first time I've seen woodpecker feathers up close.

I created a composition with sixteen feathers. Midway through working on my painting, I thought that maybe I should have included less feathers as it would have been so much less work but I like that there are so many shapes and variations of feathers included. The photos show my work still in progress but I am happy with how it is coming along.

While working on it, I learned that painting while breathing is complicated. My delicate subjects were flying all over the place. (Trying to paint without breathing is even more complicated!) I finally placed my reference feathers under a cello sleeve so they would stay in one place and I could still see them. Much better!

I am thankful to the hungry hawk and my scout Meeko for the gift of these beautiful feathers.

"Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift." Albert Einstein

A Clean Studio and Backyard Miracles

I took this photo this past week in my studio. I'm pretty happy with how it's looking these days. My studio cleanup has made a big change. Because you are my friends, I will admit that there are a few things not appearing in the photo that still need to be dealt with. There are quite a few boxes not within the camera's range--maybe even nudged out of its range with my foot when I took the photo. My studio is not in a state of perfection yet (as if) but this part is what I see when I come up the stairs and it is making me happy. There has also been more light this past week. I love that.

I have a skylight in my studio which gets northern light. It is lovely, even light--the perfect light for painting. In the winter though, my skylight is sometimes covered completely with snow and, on those days, there is virtually no natural light. The skylight is my only window.  My art lamp is good. I've had it for decades and it combines fluorescent and incandescent bulbs to approximate natural light. But nothing can compare with good daylight. I am grateful for the days when I get that.

I have been painting in past weeks. If you follow my Instagram feed, Facebook page or Twitter account, you may have already seen these paintings. I took these photos one evening, hence the dramatic lighting. :)

These wintry days, I often paint using photos as reference. This is a sweet little Eastern cottontail rabbit who visited our front yard last June. I have loved rabbits all my life. I have a postcard of Albrecht Dürer's Young Hare that I have kept for years. This is my first painting of a rabbit. I am so proud of how this little fellow turned out. I am going to paint more. I know that many people detest the rabbits that visit their gardens and ravage their plants. To date, the rabbits who have visited here have only looked cute and pruned my plants lightly (and driven Meeko slightly crazy). All is well...for now.

I did this daffodil painting from a photo I took in my back garden. It was in either Chloé or Emma's garden patch. The photo didn't show the tulip in the background or daffodil buds at the side. I added those to help the composition feel more balanced. I know that not everyone agrees with using photos as references. I really don't see the problem as long as you use your own photos (definitely not okay to copy others' photos without permission) and also not be a slave to them. I like to use my photos as a starting point and then to put them aside and make sure that the painting makes sense on its own.

This is another painting that I worked on most recently. I slept very badly for a few nights this past week. About four hours each night. Because of the very tired state I was in, I didn't want to do final details on a painting I loved or to try to start a painting that might be complicated. I have a stack of paintings in one drawer--paintings that were either intended as studies or were meant to be more but didn't quite work out that way. I figured I would spend time on one of them. If it worked, great. If it didn't, back in the drawer. This is the 'after' of the one I decided to work on. I should have taken a 'before' photo. I am so happy with how this painting has turned out. This was a sweet, unexpected visitor in our yard about two years ago. I had to look it up at the time. It looked like something between a large sparrow and a fluffy bunny. A google search showed me that it was a 'snow bunting'. The study in my drawer seemed awkward and had many hard edges. I scrubbed the hard edges out and adjusted the parts that had bothered me (around the beak and eyes). I really like how it has turned out.


A lesson. Perhaps a life lesson. Don't give up on your paintings. I have learned this over and over again. Maybe every now and then there is one that definitely deserves to end up in the recycling basket but for most, put them in a drawer. On another day in perhaps another year, there will be hope. Oh yes, and be open to the appearance of miracles in your backyard like snow buntings. :)

Warm Wishes from Canada!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers! I have been looking at Instagram today and it is making me hungry! All of those beautiful photos of Thanksgiving dinners. Oh my, the pies!

We celebrate Thanksgiving in October in Canada so we fill our bellies then but, come November, we feel hungry again! Imagine that!

I am offering free shipping in my Etsy shop this weekend for the big Black Friday + Cyber Monday shopping weekend. I've never offered free shipping before. I hope it helps some holiday shoppers. It's available to everyone no matter where you live and there is no coupon required. I've already adjusted the shipping to zero in all of my listings. It is available right now up until midnight on Monday, December 2, 2013. I hope you take a moment to have a look.

I had the weirdest dream about it last night.  I dreamt I was wildly trying to cancel my free shipping offer as I realized that the frozen hamburger patties were going to defrost in the mail. Huh? I was mailing single frozen patties in envelopes. How bizarre! Where did that come from? When I was writing about my dream in an email to my sister this morning, I started laughing to the point of tears.

If any of you do take advantage of my free shipping offer, I promise no defrosted hamburger patties, just pretty paintings, prints and cards celebrating flowers and nature. You know me by now. :)

In other news, we finally have pretty snow here! Usually Montreal leads in snow but, this year, everyone seemed to get it before us. Two nights ago, we got our first snow but it was slushy and, well, it just didn't count. Last night, we got a light covering of pretty snow. Not much but this one counted. Plus, the temperatures were cold enough that Meeko and I were able to do our winter forest walk for the first time this season. Talk about joy! Part of the trail in the little forest near us goes through a swampy area so it needs to be below freezing to walk there. It's inaccessible for three seasons of the year. I wasn't sure if it would be okay today but the water was frozen 'just' enough. It is one of the few places that I am able to walk with Meeko off-leash. We have worked so hard together, so he knows that he can run ahead a certain distance but then needs to wait for me to catch up. I was so proud of him today to see that he had our routine memorized despite the fact that we haven't been there since last March. I wish I had my camera with me today as the forest was so pretty but there will be plenty of opportunities in the weeks ahead.

Once again, Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating today too! I was just reading that Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah haven't coincided for 125 years and it won't happen again for more than 70,000 years. Wow! Wherever you are in the world, whether you are experiencing snowflakes or sunshine, and whatever your faith, I hope you are celebrating both the day and season. ❤

A Very Special Painting

When I received the message on Facebook this past summer, I remember reading it with my hand over my heart. Andra introduced herself as the mother of a little girl who had recently died of cancer, a day before her sixth birthday. She wondered if I would do a painting in memory of her daughter.

My initial reaction was that I couldn’t possibly do it. It seemed so sad. I thought that doing the painting would make me feel sad. Then I reread her message.

The girl she was describing was a joyous and happy person. Andra listed the colors she liked best: pink, red, yellow, light blue and green. She told me how Helen loved flowers, ladybugs, rolly-pollies, butterflies, birds, the beach and sea creatures. She said that she wanted the painting to include Helen’s name as well as some of her loves.

I realized that this was a very happy painting she was describing.  Helen enjoyed so many of the same things that I do. She was someone who loved nature and who thoroughly appreciated the world around her. The list of Helen’s likes included many of the things I love to paint the most.

I wrote back to Andra and, over a series of emails, we came to an agreement that I would do a painting for Helen. She wanted a painting that was larger than I usually do. After much thought, I committed to doing a 16 x 20 inch watercolour.

Andra was lovely throughout the process. She left the visual side of the painting entirely up to me. I showed her the initial rough sketch I had come up with and then she very, very patiently waited to see the final version. The painting took me several weeks to complete.

My initial rough sketch when I was trying to figure out the contents and composition.

I started by painting the banner and then began adding all of the other elements.

Slowly but surely, I added all of the creatures and flowers.

With most of main elements in place, I started to pull the sky down and behind the flowers.

This watercolour was an absolute joy to work on but it also was a lot of work. Its size, the number of things it included made it one of the most complex paintings I have worked on in a very long while. The detailed sketch alone took me two days. I don’t generally do detailed sketches but this painting required it. By the time I finished the painting, I realized I had looked at almost 50 reference photos in order to be sure that I was being true to all of the creatures and flowers I had included. In my research, I even found a flower that is called ‘Helen’s Flower’ (Helenium). It’s the yellow flower on the left and right (visible in the full view of the painting). The shell, sea urchin and starfish were all from my seashell collection. Some of my garden flowers were used as models.

A detail from the centre of the painting

Details from the bottom of the painting - A snail, mushrooms, a heart-shaped rock and three rollie-pollies playing together on the rocks at the right hand side.

It was so important to me to create something that was not just a good painting but something that was appropriate to and worthy of Helen’s memory. I wanted to create a painting that Helen would have loved.

Do you want to know something? I didn’t feel sad once while working on this painting. I felt happy. As I was working on it, I found myself thinking ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice to have met Helen and then I realized I did. I had met Helen “through” my painting.

After I sent photos of the completed painting to Andra, she responded within minutes:  “Oh, my goodness...It is absolutely beautiful! Helen would have loved it! The painting is soooo Helen…” Mission accomplished. I had created a painting that was true to Helen. I burst into happy tears.

When I asked Andra's permission to do this blog post about my painting and the story behind it, she said she would only agree if people didn’t feel sorry for Helen or her family. She said “Helen was so joyful and happy, she must be remembered that way too.”

My painting was done for a beautiful, joyful little girl who loved the world and all those around her. This painting is a celebration of a wonderful person named Helen.

Painting Goodbye to Autumn

A few weeks ago, I started a painting of two maple leaves and a key. When I went back to work on it yesterday, I found that the leaves had curled up in my absence. I don't blame them. Autumn naps are lovely.

Curly or not, they had still retained enough colour to use them as references. I put the final touches on my painting this morning.

I love painting leaves so much. They are like tiny quilts full of different colours and textures. I love the challenge of trying to replicate all of the hues, veins and crinkles.

I have tried a lot of different watercolour papers in the past couple of years. For this painting, I went back to a paper I used to use quite often: Saunders Waterford 140 lb. cold-pressed paper. I had forgotten how nice it was to work with.

A detail from my painting

It is freezing cold here right now. Time for scarves, boots and gloves. I always hold out until the very last moment for hats. :) We have had snowflakes in the air but not on the ground so far. There's a small reprieve from the wintry weather ahead though. Temperatures are supposed to be quite mild over the weekend, so I have lucked out as far as weather for planting bulbs goes. Good thing too as I have over 300 of them to plant. We have to put our garden furniture away too.

Here are some photos from Instagram (a work-in-progress photo, a leaf collection from a walk and the finished painting):

I'll leave you with a photo of my studio assistant this morning. He'll have you know that inspiring someone as they paint autumn leaves is exhausting work!

When Good Plants Go Bad

When Meeko and I go on our neighbourhood walks, I spend a lot of time looking at other people's gardens. I often notice tidy clumps of black-eyed susans maybe two or three feet in height.

When I was a little girl, I loved black-eyed susans.  Black-eyed susans, cow vetch, asters, wild daisies and queen anne's lace would often end up in bouquets gathered on walks through the little ravine not far from my childhood house.

I think you would all admit that black-eyed susans are a very happy looking flower. It's really quite hard to be mad at them. But I am.

You see there's a gang of black-eyed susans that have decided to take over one end of my garden. They are actually the flowerbeds that belong to Emma and Chloé. Neither of them really took care of their garden plots this year and I refused to do it for them. The black-eyed susans figured that no one was looking and moved in, but not in a polite and delicate way. These black-eyed susans have filled out every inch of the beds and have grown to a crazy height. They are taller than me!

I asked a local model if he would mind posing in front of them to give you a sense of scale.

Somewhere in behind that adorable model (thank you Meeko) and those towering yellow hooligans are pink phlox, obedient plant and a few other plants I haven't seen in so long I've forgotten what they are.

It's clear that these black-eyed susans have world domination in mind and I'm going to have to take them out but, you know what? I'm going to wait until they've finished blooming. I don't admire their thug-like behaviour but I've got to admit that they're pretty in a vase.

And they even came in handy as a photo prop alongside an original watercolor I just listed on Etsy.

So I guess if they are using part of my garden rent-free, I'll take advantage of having them. Bouquet of black-eyed susans, anyone?

*  *  *  *  *

A bit of research has determined that the flowers that have taken over my garden are probably brown-eyed susans rather than black-eyed susans although they are closely related. Brown-eyed susans tend to have smaller flowers not to mention rude behaviour. ;)

A Mermaid's Tale

We have just come back from a glorious week beside the ocean in Maine. Two days at home and my head is still back in Maine with the mermaids, sea birds and beach glass.

Mermaids, you ask? Well, the only one I was able to get a photo of was a beautiful sand sculpture made by Emma and her cousin, Erica. But I think there's a possibility that there were other mermaids lingering behind the rocks just beyond my camera's reach.

Emma and Erica's beautifully sculpted mermaid complete with seaweed hair.

We rented a house with my sister's family. We spent many hours walking on the rocky beach in front of where we stayed. Each tide would bring in more sea glass, enough to share with everyone who was there.

My collection of sea glass and pottery. The most amazing find was the glass stopper pictured on the right.

It turns out that Emma has an eagle eye for finding sea glass. Even after the rest of us had combed the beach thinking we had found it all, Emma would find pocketsful of sea glass treasures.

And speaking of eagles, we saw one!  A bald eagle flew by on more than one occasion. Once, it flew within feet of the front porch. I don't have a photo of it that time. We just stood there awestruck. Here's a photo of it a little higher up in the sky on one of its fly-bys.

We also saw loons, herons and seagulls. I took a series of photos of one heron looking for and catching his supper.

I've started a painting of some of my beautiful beach finds. It's a way of me staying in touch with our beautiful Maine vacation while I slowly get used to being back home.

This painting is still in progress. A few more details to go.

Uh oh. It's happening again. There go my thoughts, somewhere back in Maine with the mermaids, beach glass and sea birds.

A Baby Sparrow, a Feather and a Cautionary Tale

Summer is here! Both Emma and Chloé are on holiday now. My days change significantly when they are in the house each day. Not that they are difficult at their age but I find my brain is more easily distracted when others are here. Plus for sure, there are occasional interruptions and taxi duties. And more sharing is required of computers, etc. Now it is the cranky, middle-aged mother, not toddlers, having difficulty with sharing.

Good news! I am slowly but surely getting used to my new computer setup and starting to produce prints from it. So proud of this little baby sparrow print.  I just added it to my shop today. I'll also be adding him in a larger 8 x 10 format. I have other prints ready to go into my shop and a pile more paintings to convert. It's slow work but worth it to me to do it right. Plus Emma, who is a Photoshop whiz, has been helping me a lot.

After having one of the best months ever sale-wise in May, June has been so, so quiet. I was worrying about it and then realized that it was actually a good thing as my computer situation would have made it very hard to keep up had it been busier. A good lesson in accepting and adapting to circumstances.

Here's another addition to my shop this week.

This is a card based on my sparrow feather painting. A customer asked me if that painting was available as a card. I try whenever I can to respond to customer suggestions like this. This one was a real challenge. I first approached it the way I do most of my paintings when making them into a print or card. Usually I scan the painting, then isolate my image and remove the paper texture around it. No matter how I did it, I was losing fine detail from my feather. I worked on it for hours, Emma helped me too, and I was about to abandon the idea of it ever being a card. Then I had the idea of including the paper texture! In the end, by including the paper texture and adding two fine lines as a frame, it has retained the three-dimensional look of the original work. The original painting was done within a rectangular hand-embossed area. It was definitely a 'eureka' moment. Wish it had come a little sooner but glad it came at all. :)

And a cautionary tale. I was so elated when I finally figured out the feather card that I immediately sent a message to the customer who had made the enquiry. And then I quickly sent an email to an artist friend with whom I share lots of the ups and downs of my art making and print making. I pressed send and then looked at my screen. To my horror, I had sent the second email (the one destined for my friend) to the customer as well. In the email I had referred to the 'stupid...I mean sweet sparrow feather', all within the context of the hours of work it had taken to finally get it right. A friend would understand. A customer? I'm not so sure. When I realized what I had done, I immediately sent a note of apology to the customer but I think the damage was done. I haven't heard back from her. I still feel awful and so embarrassed about it. From me to you: Be careful with that 'send' button.

I seem to be more tired lately, more distracted, clumsier. My feet seem to be twice as long as usual. Do you know the feeling? I am wearing new glasses which may be part of the problem. But I also think that the past weeks with all of the computer troubles have taken their toll. Nothing that a bit of summer can't cure I'm sure. ♥