Another Great Adventure

This is one of the many landscapes we visited yesterday. We were planning on taking a short morning trip to a road we had not traveled yet and then return for an early dialysis session. Well, one state highway led to another county road that looked interesting, which led to something else and it was after 2:00 PM when we finally returned. Of course, stopping every few minutes to take photos added to the time we were gone! The colors of that area were just phenomenal. This is part of the area that Georgia O'Keefe lived in and painted during the last part of her life. I can certainly see the wisdom of her choice, it is such a varied and colorful landscape here.

This is part of Lake Abiquiu. The water was so glassy and still when we were there! Wouldn't this be a wonderful place to have a houseboat?!

For my next project and post, I will stitch together some of the many series of photos I took for panoramas. Like I said, I took many photos!

Painting day

As requested by Susie Short in my prior post, here is the painting I worked on with Barb during our painting day. The RV park where we are staying this month has beautiful hollyhocks growing down the slope from the laundry room. I took photos the first day we were here and worked from those. I brought only a block of Arches 300-lb paper with me, as well as Pelikan transparent paints as my travel set. I am unused to working on the more absorbent 300-lb paper, as well as the more opaque paints, so this isn't what I expected for a result. However, I am not displeased with the softness of it. I think that hollyhocks require a more subdued effect since they are such an old-fashioned flower, or at least when I see them I feel nostalgic.

I am working on another painting now of the Rio Chama, which runs right beside the park. When we were here in May, the snow runoff made it run more swiftly and high up on the banks. Now it is a mere stream and rocks are visible on the sandbars.

I start working on another posting for today which shows some of what we saw on our adventure yesterday.

Barb and Charlie at Chama

Our good friends, Barb and Charlie, joined us in Chama for a few days. They are staying at a nearby lodge. She and I had great fun painting this morning at our motorhome while Tom and Chalie went for a drive for some photo op's. The temperature was perfect, Josh Groban was playing on my iPod player and we were painting together. As Barb said, "it just doesn't get any better than this!" I agree!

Wildlife!

We have been seeing quite a few critters in our explorations here. The chipmunk is robbing seed out of the bird feeder set out by one of our fellow RV'rs here at the park. The wild turkeys were seen along the highway and stayed there long enough for us to turn around and get some photos.

We hear of bear sightings and elk sightings down by the river just after sundown, but unfortunately that is when the mosquitoes are the worst and they like my skin too much to venture out at that time. This trip we are parked up above the river, in the open where the skeeters are not so bad. Our friends, Barb and Charlie, are due in tonight and she and I have a date to sit out by the river to paint one day while they are here in Chama. I am planning on changing that to sitting under our awning by the motorhome and painting from photos I have taken of the river! Don't like those mosquitoes!

Mule Deer in Chama

We went into the heart of Chama to the one grocery store here yesterday. I have learned to not venture forth in this area without my camera since there seems to be so much to photograph. Yesterday was no different. By the side of the main street in Chama was a grassy area; standing in this area, eating breakfast, was this beautiful Mule Deer. It just stood there and posed for me, we were not very far away from her and she was not bothered at all.

Right near our RV park I have so far seen multiple chipmunk sightings, a deer and a fox. Being from the desert I never get to see these critters; we only have coyotes, jack rabbits and the occasional bobcat! I am promised photos of the bear that comes down on occasion to the river here in the park, so will share those when I receive them. I have left my cell phone number with one of the campers at the river's edge that if this bear returns to give me a call and I will hurry there for photos.

Great Sand Dunes Nat'l Park

We drove to Alamosa, CO yesterday and decided to go up to the nearby Great Sand Dunes Nat;l Park. When we lived in Colorado Springs, CO back in the late seventies we used to go four-wheeling in this park, which was such fun. We only took photos this trip, however. The day was cloudy so there weren't the good shadows on the dunes, but the valley it extends into was so pretty I thought this would be a good pano shot. Another great day of exploring.....

Panorama

This is an eight-shot pano of the Trujillo Meadows Reservoir. It is of the north end of the lake. I also did a pano of the south end and will try to upload that in another post. These large files take FOREVER to upload to the blog, but at least it accepted this one. This was a glass-smooth lake when we were there and you can see the circles where the fish were jumping. No license, no fishing poles....so sad. It sure was a pretty area, though.

Hopefully, you can click on the photo and it will show more detail in a larger view....hey, I just tried it and it did enlarge it....cool!

Conejos River Valley

We drove from Chama toward Antonito, CO yesterday, turning off before we got to Antonito. One of the joys we find with exploring the areas we visit is the spontaneity to go off the beaten track and see what we can find. We saw the turnoff to Trujillo Meadows, had heard of that from friends, found a pristine reservoir there. I took some photos to stitch together of the lake and will do that later. When we left there, we found another side road that wound through the Conejos River valley, 23-mile dirt road that had breathtaking scenery the whole way. The round trip of 46 miles took us over three hours since we kept stopping along the way, frequently, for photo op's. It was a lovely day, perfect weather, wonderful scenery and the joy of discovery for us. We are so thankful that doing the dialysis in the motorhome successfully allows us a return to what we both enjoy so much...exploring places we have never been. Life is good!

Chama, NM

We made it to Chama, NM on Saturday afternoon. This will be our home for the next month! We chose a route through northern Arizona, driving to Gallop, NM the first day and driving through Farmington, NM to Chama on Saturday. This rock was one of the many we saw on this route. I think this must be the balanced rock capital of the world!

Proud Grandma!

Our son sent this recent photo of our Aubrey practicing mixing colors with her watercolor set. How fun is this?! I can't wait for our next painting session together, hope it will be soon. I want to send her some pieces of good watercolor paper. She likes my little surprise packages and I think she is ready to progress to Arches! We still have her first painting hanging on our refrigerator.

Also, please note the chair upon which she is sitting...we gave that to her for her first Christmas. She was too young then to appreciate it, but Patrick says she has claimed it as "her chair" and uses it all the time.

WIP 2, or 3 or?

Okay, I did it again. While at the Art Club this afternoon I was painting away and listening (okay contributing) to the conversational thread going around the room, and neglected to take photos of what I was doing during the WIP phases of this painting. Here is what I arrived at home with...a painting deserving of marinating on the board for awhile. I like the atmospheric perspective of this, and achieved most of the color goals I had from my reference photo, but will still await more thinking on this one. These canyon painting require a bit more THINKING than others! If I concur about what needs to be changed, I will attack a full sheet with this painting scheme.

Be aware, be very aware!

Time For Another WIP

One of my top painting goals is to be able to paint the Grand Canyon as I see it. I have had this ref photo sitting and marinating in my mind since I took the photo last August when we drove to the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon, from the west side of the canyon. The colors of this part of the canyon are wonderful and I hope to be able to capture that. This will be an 11x15 study, if I can learn enough from doing this study to do a credible job I will do it for real on a full sheet...gulp!

I just know that I am not getting any closer to realizing my goal by NOT trying to paint it so will dive in and see what happens. My approach to line drawings on watercolor paper is usually a very minimalist approach. I don't like the construction lines to show through the painting so I draw the drawing on the paper with a #2 lead pencil, soak the paper and then staple onto the Homosote board. After this is thoroughly dry, I use a kneaded eraser and erase much of the darkness of the lines. I took this photo before lightening the lines with the eraser. This is far more of a detailed drawing than I usually do, but when trying to paint these canyon walls faithfully I usually get very lost so will try from a more detailed approach this time. That seemed to work better when painting my Canyonlands painting two years ago.

Kokopelli With Staff

Those of you who follow my blog may recognize the reference photo for this painting from below. This is the Kokopelli with a staff that I hiked up to near Deming, NM. I took so many petroglyph photos at this site, but this is my fav...a wonderful, huge Kokopelli with a staff instead of a flute. I took this with my longest camera lens since by the time I found it, it was higher than I had the strength to climb to get closer, and I like the look of him on this pile of large boulders anyway from this angle.

I tried to incorporate some compositional tips to make this read well, such as having one big boulder and a dead tree branch pointing to the center of the photo and having the Kokopelli in a "sweet spot". It was so hot at the time we found him that I wanted that to show in these rocks, also.

Diana Webb and I met at my house this afternoon. It was such fun meeting with Diana and her husband, Jim. I met them through RVPics.com. We discussed all of the important motorhome details, they looked at my art and I gave her the prints of the paintings I had painted from her worthy photos. It was such great fun to meet with fellow RVPics members, this is a great group!

NM Petroglyphs

Before we left NM we visited this petroglyph site on a very hot day. It was an arduous and hot climb to find these but I felt it worth it as this collection was the best I have seen (and I have seen a lot of petroglyphs!). I think this one must be a drooping yucca, as the area was full of them. As they die, they look like this.

The Kokopelli glyph is the only one I have seen with a staff instead of a flute. Isn't he grand?

I believe one of these is of a tortoise, the most sophisticated glyph of one I have seen. The level of sophisticated detail at this site was unbelievable. Most of the time I cannot imagine what the figures are of, but sometimes the more sophisticated of them give a better clue. This is true of the Bighorn Sheep glyph.

It was a great, although taxing and tiring morning spent traipsing about in the ancient past. We also collected more rocks for the tumbler, this was a great place for that, too.

Now to return our home back to normal after unpacking the motorhome. We will have good memories of our week in Deming. The RV park where we stayed was the 81 Palms RV Park and it was, as always, a good home-away-from-home. The owners are always pleasant and they keep the park in very good condition. They are also knowledgeable about the area around Deming.

Still in Deming area

We visited the town of Columbus, NM yesterday and went to Pancho Villa State Park. Since I am so woefully lacking in historical retention of what happened when, I was surprised to learn this happened in 1916 and was a successful attack on this fort near the border with Mexico. The state park has a great museum with some of the historical vehicles and weaponry used when General Pershing led the counter raid into Mexico to find Pancho Villa. He never was found, but the border was once again safe.

Today we went to the desert to a place near Deming to find petroglyphs. Despite directions to find this place and knowing we were in the right place, we only found three petroglyphs. We decided to re-read the directions and plot our course by GPS readings and return tomorrow morning. Today's adventure was not a total disappointment in that we found many rocks to pick up and try to tumble and polish when home. We also saw this owl haunting the cliffs we were near. It sure kept an eye on us, must have had a nest somewhere near it was guarding. Owls can be so huge, this one was medium sized but large against those boulders.

Good weather and good times still here. We actually had some rain this afternoon, but nothing stormy. It does get hot but we are on the desert still so we expected that. More tomorrow, hopefully with photos of the petroglyphs we have been promised.

Las Cruces

Whenever we are passing through Las Cruces we always make a run to nearby Hatch, world famous for their chile peppers. We did so today on our short visit to Las Cruces and ate at our favorite Hatch Mexican restaurant, the Pepper Pot. Wonderful food! Anthony Bourdain did a recent show highlighting this restaurant, our son recognized it after we mentioned the Pepper Pot.

We also made a stop at my favorite bead store in Las Cruces, Western Traders. I find such interesting beads and findings at this store.

We are back in Deming this afternoon and will explore tomorrow some more.

Photography Safari

We spent yesterday morning at Rockhound State Park and kept looking at the ground for rocks that were interesting. This is a park where you area allowed to collect rocks and keep them. We found some jasper and rhyolite, and others that are just interesting, I have no idea what they are. We will fire up the tumbler when we return home. Here is my weapon of choice when on photo safari, with my new longer lens attached. So far, I am liking it really well.

The other photo is of a dumb photographer we saw who should have known better than to climb up on those rocks! Oh well, at least I had my walking stick for balance.

I'll do another entry for today's adventure....

Deming, NM

We are in Deming, NM for a few days. We plan on using this as our home base and scooting around nearby places and exploring more. Our first day we spent the morning exploring City of Rocks, a bizarre area of rocks resembling Bedrock of the Flintstones' fame. It is a state park and is halfway between Deming and Silver City.

These four photos are of that area. I was experimenting with my new 70-300 mm lens for my Olympus (early happy birthday from Tom!) and it was great to have. I was much farther away from these rocks than it appears in the photos.

When you see the bird in the yucca photo, I had seen this mama bird on the nest on our way past on this loop of the park and on our way out found it again and zoomed in close. I am not a birdwatcher so cannot identify her species but you can kind of see her chick to her lower right. Judging by her size and her beak, I am reminded of a small falcon I saw at Sonoran Desert Museum and it was identified as a falcon, so maybe it is one?

Windows to the Past

I promised myself I would finish this by the end of the week and I hope it is finished. I will have it critiqued by the WcW group and see what they think. I enjoyed doing this one, as I have all the paintings I have done from Roch's photos.

Window to the Past - WIP 2

I forgot to stop and take a photo a few stages ago, I just started painting and kept on going. I have the shadows mostly established now on the wall stucco and adobe bricks and will start texturing the areas more next. I still need to paint what wood is left on this wall, also. At this point, I am trying to decide whether to deepen the values of that sky or not, I know I need to add some ground shadows under some of the closest foliage. Still plenty to do, but I'm still lovin' this one.

Window to the Past - WIP 1

This painting WIP is from another wonderful photo courtesy of Roch at NM Jeep Tours. It is of a crumbling ruin of an old adobe building. I have most of the center section done but will tweak the values once I get the adobe walls finished so I can see how much darker the values have to be.

As always, I appreciate Roch's continued willingness to have me paint from his excellent photographs.

I look forward to working more on this one!

Bracelets for Aubrey

I made two stretchy little bracelets for my granddaughter, Aubrey, and sent them to her in a package with some goodies we found for her on our recent trip. She models one of these bracelets here. I guess she was pretty excited to get them and even recognized it was her package since it had her personalized pink address label with the bear on it, so it was from Grandma. Cool.

Even more cool is the fact that after opening the package and rifling through the contents, she asked if when Daddy gets home they could Skype Grandma and talk to her. A true child of the millennium! This is so cool being a grandparent in this age of easy communication with those who don't live close to you, they are but a mouse click away!

I found a package of these butterfly glasses for children and knew they would be perfect for her so included those, too. She looks mahvalous!

Easter Aubrey - 2009

I have been working on this painting of Aubrey now for over a month, off and on. Well, more off than on, but I am at the point where I dare not scrub out that basket handle one more time or there will be a hole in the paper! I concentrated on getting Aubrey done as well as I could and ended up messing up the basket handle. Duh. Anyway, I accomplished her dress and the mood of this scene and am fairly happy with it.

Aubrey is now a three-year-old, hard to believe she is that age already.

Best Laundry Day Ever

Today I needed to wash a few loads of laundry. Outside the laundry building was a nice porch with chairs to pass the time while the machines do their thing. Across the way was a pile of fallen wood. In this pile, a mama fox had a litter of three pups. I sat on the porch for an hour and a half watching these pups cavort on these logs. I didn't have my multiplier lens with me when they were the most active, so this photo is the best I can show after Tom brought the lens to me. They were playing closer to where I was at first and so cute. I think you can click on this photo and make it larger and, hopefully, see these babies better.

Georgia O'Keefe Country

Wednesday we drove toward Abiquiu, NM. This is the land where Georgia O'Keefe lived and painted in her later years. I can see why. As is very typical of this area, the clouds build up just about every afternoon and bring very dark skies. These dark skies, though, have cloud holes which light up the wonderful buttes and cliffs like a spotlight, making for much fun photography.

As we left and started climbing the mountain again toward Chama, the black clouds just broke loose with a terrific downpour, so that was exciting, too!

Sky Mountain RV Resort in Chama, NM

We traveled this morning to Chama, NM. The sun was shining most of the way here from Santa Fe, but the clouds were gathering in the direction we were heading. It waited until we arrived and got our RV site hooked up before it started raining; so I was able to get a few photos before I came in and started posting on the computer.



We are staying at Sky Mountain RV Resort, which is a lovely setting beside the Chama River. We chose a site which is under the tree canopy and about 10-feet from the river. As I am typing the water is flowing right in front of our rig, with the large windshield affording us a wonderful view of the river. The temps here have been in the high thirties overnight and in the seventies during the day...makes me hate the thought of returning to the desert on this coming weekend! We'll enjoy the cool and clean green while we can and return home early next week.

I plan to sit out beside the river and do some pleine air painting while here, it just begs for that!

Unser Racing Museum

While in Albuquerque we visited the Unser Racing Museum. This is a very state-of-the-art museum with many digital visual displays as well as many of the Unser family race cars on display. We saw all of their championship rings, trophies and many photos of races we remember watching on TV.

While there, Tom climbed into the cockpit of the race car simulator and thought it was an excellent simulator. It looked like fun to me, too, but I was too much of a wimp to try after seeing Tom was able to get the car up to 180 mph without crashing it.


We always have thought about stopping by the museum while traveling through Albuquerque but had not done that, it is worth stopping for.

A few New Mexico Photos

This first photo is of Roch, our guide who owns NM Jeep Tours. He is a very experienced guide who knows a great deal about the beautiful state of New Mexico and loves to enjoy the natural settings he shows to people. If you are interested in taking a tour with Roch when in New Mexico, check out his website at www.NMjeeptours.com. He is willing and able to custom design a tour for anyone's special interests and needs. He shares his photos of these tours on his Flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/29864089@N06/...check it out if you want to see some of the true beauty that is New Mexico.


This next photo is of some of the red rocks we saw at the last part of our daylong tour. It had rained on them and the red color was especially vivid at that time. The wash was dry, but very colorful with the red soil.








This petroglyph of a mask, probably ceremonial, was found at a site in the mountains and was very isolated, which is a good thing since it was not a protected site. There was no graffiti, which was especially nice to see. Thankfully, Roch has permits which allow him access to these wonderful sites on tours and I felt as though we were being given a special gift, seeing petroglyphs which few have seen.


We also visited the Unser Raceing Museum while in Albuquerque, I have not downloaded my camera photos of that yet, so will do that later. All-in-all this has been a great half of our trip and we move on to the last week tomorrow morning, leaving Santa Fe and traveling to Chama, NM. Cool weather, here we come!

We're Still Alive

I will try to include some photos later, but I just wanted to let you all know we are still alive and well, having a good time, but unable so far to get good WiFi reception so I have not been in contact with anyone either through the blogs or e-mail.

We spent a few days in Las Cruces where I found a great bead store and we had good weather. We traveled to Albuquerque for five days and the WiFi system at our RV park was being worked on so we had nothing there. So far, so good, at this RV park near Santa Fe. The park is beautiful with mountains and trees.

We took our tour with Roch of New Mexico Jeep Tours on Wednesday and had a wonderful day. He really knows the area and is a wonderful tour guide, stopping whenever I asked so I could take as many photos as I wanted (almost 500 that day). He is a great photographer too, so was willing to stop when he knew of a good place for that best camera angle. More about this great tour company in a later post.

The dialysis in the motorhome is going well and we are encouraged that we can continue to travel this way. It is more complicated than before, but do-able at this point and we still love to travel in our motorhome.

I will organize some of my photos and post them here soon, WiFi willing!

Aubrey Easter WIP 3

I got to work on this at the art club this afternoon and found it so enjoyable! Only my BFF Barb was there but we solved the problems of the world while we worked on our paintings!

There are still many little things to be done to this but so far, so good! I need to make her look more like three-year-old I think, she has been aged a bit more than reasonable in this. We'll see how it all turns out.

Easter Aubrey WIP II

I made some time this morning to add to this, I just had to make her look less like a ghost child. I strengthened the modeling shadows and glazed another layer of skin color and started on the hair. It helps that she, in real life, has hair the color of quin burnt orange, how cool is that?

There is still much to be done with her before I begin the foliage fine-tuning; if I can't finish her to my liking there is no need to go on to the foliage! So far, so good.

PS...the first WIP photo was taken early this morning inside, thus the yellowish tinge. I should have corrected the white balance for that but I didn't. This photo was taken outside and more truly reflects the true colors of the painting so far.