Pahrump,NV and Death Valley

We are back in Pahrump, NV again, planning on visiting Death Valley and exploring more areas we have missed in the past. We explored quite a bit of Death Valley yesterday, spending all day in the park.

We were told that this was the third largest wildflower bloom seasons on record there, and it was believable since we saw such colorful wildflowers that we have not seen there before. What a treat!




On our way back to Pahrump yesterday, I was driving behind this junk truck, which we both found to be so funny-looking. I asked Tom to take a photo as I hung back, afraid this tower of metal would topple back upon us. The driver finally waved us past when the coast was clear, but we decided it was a sight to see.




Many of the mountains/hills in DV are just a jumble of colorful layers. The geology of this place is amazing, and the colors change with the time of day...best at sunset or sunrise...we have experienced both there in the past and it is a wonderful sight.



On the way to Pahrump, we passed along a highway called Joshua Tree Highway. The Joshua Trees here were so healthy-looking and we saw many of the blossoms they have in the Spring. I have never been up close and personal with these blossoms and took advantage of our timing to be here at the right time to stop and take some close-up photos. Aren't they interesting?



The mountains just keep showing diagonal planes in places, where it is easy to see the different types of rocks and minerals in each strata. Interesting.




This beauty was blooming in all its glory and I loved getting to see it. It is a Beaver Tail Cactus.

Lake Pleasant

We took a two-night motorhome trip to Lake Pleasant, they have a very nice RV park there, as well as have developed the area into a county park which has enhanced the desert instead of destroying it. There are two large marinas and the lake itself is a large reservoir. We happened to visit when the wildflowers were at their peak. I may survive the allergy assaults, I haven't decided yet. At any rate, the desert was ablaze with yellows...brittle bush, desert marigolds, etc.

Giant Argentinian

This is a cactus that is in full bloom all around us in the neighborhoods of our community. I have wanted to paint this for awhile, but hadn't gotten quite the photo I wanted. Okay, the real reason is it looks hard! Well, I got a sprawling one photographed this week and will put my thinking cap on and decide how I want to paint this. I am thinking, so far, about a full sheet of Yupo! Yeah, that's what I'll do. Okay, now for the background....hmmmmm.

The Elusive Ajo Lily!

We found the lilies! They actually do exist! And, are they ever glorious. The soil in this area was so very sandy, unlike the other areas we explored today and the lilies seemed to thrive in this one area. They, indeed, looked more like cultivated lilies than I anticipated considering the arid area in which they grew.

Here are a few words I found on the 'net about these lilies: Ajo lily (Hesperocallis undulata)

Common names: desert lily.

Bulb, Lily Family.

Blooms February-April in southwestern Arizona, southeastern California and northwestern Sonora, Mexico.

6-24 inches (15-60 cm) high with long, narrow, ruffle-edged, single leaves. The bulbs are 18-24 inches (45-60 cm) below the desert surface and only flower in a good spring.

Grows in sandy or pebbly flats. Fragrant flowers are pollinated by Hawkmoths. Tohono O'odham Indians eat the onion-flavored bulbs. Ajo means garlic in Spanish and the town, mountain range and valley are named after this flower. A good place to find them is Organ Pipe National Monument in southwestern Arizona.



A desert wash, with Courthouse Rock in the background. This was our destination for our lunch, after finding the lilies, we wound over 4-wheel drive trails for what seemed like an hour to reach the base of this rock. I was so hungry by then, but the scenery made up for it, this was a very pristine part of the desert.



Ajo Lily - Check out those blossoms and the almost prehistoric-looking leaves! This was a tall one; they came in all sizes height-wise, but no matter how short the main stems were, the blossoms were all the same wonderful size.



Two of the shorter lilies, bunched together. This was a wonderful experience to see these, and a tribute to Woodie's memory to be able to find them again after five years. We had a wonderful day that will be a lovely memory for a long time. What a wonderful way to celebrate the resurrection by being in God's cathedral!

Promised Desert Traipsing!

As promised yesterday, we did go traipsing about the desert, this time to the Harquahala Valley desert near Buckeye and Tonopah. We were joined by friends, Woodie and Margaret Mackie. Woodie had once found the elusive Ajo Lily in this are and we had as our goal finding these rare beauties. To be honest, I would not have put it past Woodie to make up a story about his finding these rare plants in the past, he's that kind of guy! But, it made a wonderful excuse for going to this area so I thought we would find what we would find and enjoy the day.

Here are some of the beauties we found in the Saddle Mountain area:



Brittle Bush - saw lots of these today!

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456666067687278610" />

Cholla blossoms - These were not shot as a macro! The cholla are famous for being buzz kills for the entire day as they "jump" onto skin and clothing and are very difficult to remove from either!



These white flowers are still a mystery. I need to drag out my field manual for wildflowers and identify them. Woodie was guessing there were in the phlox family, I don't know. Anyway, we didn't see a lot of these, they were mainly limited in area.

Note, I looked up these flowers in my wildflowers of the southwest field guide and think they most closely resemble a member of the phlox family...close enough for me to assume that is what they are! Woodie guessed that when we saw them, I now agree with him.



These Mexican poppies were glorious today. They were quite abundant where we were.



Here we caught Woodie, on the ground, trying for the perfect backlit poppies. I tried this technique myself, but found it too hard to get back up!

Happy Easter!

I am wishing you and yours a very happy Easter, whether that be celebrating the resurrection or just the joy of an emerging Spring. Enjoy your times with family and friends this day.

We are traipsing out to the desert with friends for an Easter picnic and wildflower photography (hope there are many to photograph!). The weather is lovely today and I have been looking forward to it.

Desert View - WIP 3

My Thursday afternoon with the watercolor group didn't get me very far on this painting, I still feel as though I am working on the underpainting. There is a lot to be defined and/or changed before I will feel like it is evolving from the awkward teenage stage. I forgot how absorbent this Kilamanjaro paper is, it's like painting on a paper towel. Need to do a lot of pondering at this stage.

Featured Artist!

At the Sun City Grand Art Club, I was chosen to be the Featured Artist to display some of my Yupo paintings and explain a bit of the process. Just thought you'd like to see some past paintings hanging in their new places for two months!

Crystal Bowl Tutorial

I was asked by the online Watercolor Workshop Group to write a tutorial describing my method of lifting a crystal bowl shape out of the shadows, done in a monochrome. I wrote the tutorial and many artists in the group tried it, all with beautiful results! I have prepared a slideshow of their bowls, if you would like to see them all, just click here. Aren't they great?

If you would like to read the tutorial, please click here and download it. Feel free to give this a try, but I would very much like to see the results of any paintings created from my tutorial. So, feel free to try this and send your painting photo to me at susanroper@cox.net.

San Xavier del Bac Sunset

This is the three-hour class demo I did this afternoon of the San Xavier del Bac mission corner I took the photo of years ago. I wanted to do it in sunset colors to see how that would be and the students enjoyed doing it and did a good job, also. I may tweak it here and there, but so far, so good on this!

Desert View - WIP 2

I put a base glaze of color onto the mountains and started defining, lightly, the mid ground foliage that backs up to the mountains. I am thinking the mountains need more definition, but will wait to see how much more, if any, is needed after I do the defined foreground area. I want them to recede and if I fiddle with them too much at this point they will compete with the foreground center of interest.

Ocotillo Bloom

I walked out front yesterday, just in time to see a hummingbird lunching on nectar from our Ocotillo. Our Ocotillo has reached enough maturity now that it produces more and more blooms each Spring. I knew I would need my longer lens on my camera to capture this hummer, so I went inside just long enough to switch out the lens and , of course, when I returned the hummer was gone. But, he was there before, honest! Anyway, here is one of the more opened blooms. This bloom will likely last for about a month, they hold up very well. Once the summer heat hits, though, all of these leaves will be gone and only the thorny branches will remain.

I believe that Ocotillos are part of the Euphorbia family of plants, meaning that it produces true leaves in addition to the thorns of a cactus. I found out that all cactus are euphoribas, but not all euphorbias are cactus. Hmmmm.

Desert Bloom

We had a play day yesterday where we did some errands, had lunch out, and drove around looking for and at wildflowers which are just reaching their peak in the valley at this point. Here we have the ubiquitous Brittle Bush, which grace the sides of highways and roads, probably as much for erosion control as beauty, but they are very cheerful.



Shots of the poppies and cactus, along with a few lupines north of Lake Pleasant. On the sunny slopes of these hills the poppies were wonderful, growing in great patches around the saguaros.

Desert View - WIP 1

As my mentoring classes are winding down for the season, I find myself wanting to start a more considered painting; one that I will do in phases and allow to dry between layers of paint instead of trying to do a complete painting in the three-hour sessions. I am taking the study I did below of the Utah Desert and painting the revised version (after critiques from my critique groups)on a half sheet of Kilamanjaro 300-lb paper. This is my last sheet of this paper and I want to see how it behaves before ordering any more, it has been quite some time since using it.

I find that it works better for me to underpaint the darkest darks and some of the midtones of the mountains to define them before I start painting them in earnest. This keeps me from getting lost when I start slopping on the paint. I will take care to paint the complement (in this case purple) over the underpainted areas so they will be the darkest parts of the mountains.

I truly am committed to taking my time on this one since I have done so much studying of the subject and had some good suggestions to make it a better painting. So....here we go!

My SWAP painting arrived!

This week has been a particularly busy one, and disappeared before I knew what was happening! In all of the hecticness, I neglected to share with you my latest SWAP (Sharing With Artist Partners) painting.It was painted by Joyce Thompson of Washington state and is of the LaConner Daffodil Fields. I love daffs and this is so well-painted and such a fine representation of the hope of Spring. I love it!

Arrasta Gulch

This is another of the demo paintings I did for the Friday morning group. They wanted to paint a field of flowers and I chose this photo, taken and shared by friend, Joe Ruby. This is of Arrasta Gulch in Colorado. I love the flow of the mountain gulch and the foreground flowers, but didn't think the black and gray mountains did much for my artistic soul, so we changed that. I wanted to demonstrate how mixing one's own grays and blacks was so much more lively, so we did an underpainting on the mountains that defined the darkest darks on these, then used the same two colors (quin burnt orange and ultramarine blue) to paint the mountains themselves, letting the colors blend on the paper. Artistic licenses were used broadly here by all!

I am submitting this as a final, but will let it marinate a few more days before matting it, just in case I see something I missed.

Tulips - Final

These are the tulips, somewhat improved over what I submitted awhile ago. I don't particularly excel at painting flowers (?!)and don't do that very much, although I enjoy seeing them and growing them. But, they just don't speak to my paint brushes the way other subjects do. Anyway, thanks to Barb for reminding me about that background upper foliage all going out of the painting.

I used a microfiber cloth for lifting out the highlights, particularly on the right blossom. I like the texture this method leaves.

Ron Anderson

I recently set up a blog for fellow artists, Ron Anderson, with whom I have painted on Thursday afternoons for five years. At our local community art club, we have a wonderful small group of watercolorists who reserve the club for our watercolor-y fun every Thursday afternoon. Ron is an artist who is magical to watch as he just places loose strokes on the paper and lets the watercolor magic begin. This is an example of one such painting.

He paints a variety of subjects and will make you glad you visited his blog. He will be adding many paintings to his blog in the future as he is a very prolific painter.

Dick Phillips Demo

Last night I attended the monthly Arizona Artists Guild meeting. We were privileged to have the wonderful artist, Dick Phillips, lead a critique session and then do a great demo. He was a joy to listen to and opened our eyes to just letting paintings happen, with less planning and more spontaneously creating.

This first photo is the under-painting he did. He left a very abstract white space near the center of the painting.




Dick then handed his sketch journal to a lady in the front row (I was sitting in the front row, also). He asked her to choose any sketch she wanted him to use for a reference. She chose a sketch of a mountain cabin set high atop a canyon wall. He explained that he had sketched this years ago when studying with Robert Woods, whose cabin this was.



Then, the magic started happening. He added random (seemingly) strokes with large brushes here and there, credit card and pen knife scraping and scratching and within 45 minutes created this striking painting over the under-painting.

I do not think I have the creativity to paint in this abstract way, but certainly found it fascinating to watch him do this. That white space, over which the cabin and top of the canyon wall were painted just sings to me. What an artist!

Wildflowers, At Last

Tom and I took a day off yesterday to go to Quartzsite to buy some more jewelry findings for me, but mainly to head off in that direction and stop wherever we found wildflowers blooming. We had such a wet winter that we had thought they would be starting sooner and more glorious than usual. Apparently, it depends on when the water comes, as well as how much comes. October is the month that determines the success of the Spring's wildflower season, and we didn't get much rain then. However, we are still holding out hopes for a better season than the last few years.

As we drove on the "primitive" roads we found some patches of California and Mexican poppies that were just starting to open on the sunny sides of slopes, near washes, etc. The lupines are coming along nicely, too. We hope to get out again in the weeks to come to see what we can find. Whether we manage to find many flowers or not, it always makes a good excuse for wandering around the desert, taking photos and enjoying the day together.

Artwork by Kay Verstraete

This week I set up an art blog for a friend, Kay Verstraete. She is successfully adding to it on her own and I want to share with you her work. She will be adding more of her pastels soon.

This is a sample of some of her lovely work. Drop by her blog and say Hi!

Big Horn Sheep Challenge

This painting meets my needs in three ways; one for the challenge thrown down by Gary Keimig on his blog to paint from this photo; secondly, for the Watercolor Workshop to paint in a monochromatic fashion a painting of one's choice; and, thirdly for my Friday morning mentoring class to paint from this photo, provided by Gary Keimig. So, here it is, if it fails from all three standpoints, so be it, but from my standpoint it stands on its own since I am so glad to have TRIED to paint it!

Tulips - WIP

This is one of those paintings I think would benefit from a trip to my "marinating easel". I do this in a prominent place where I walk by and see it occasionally and, most often, it jumps out at me what it needs. I know I need lots more darks to define the innards of the tulips, as well as more darks in the background around those negatively created leaves. I plan on working on my Big Horn Sheep challenge painting this afternoon (Gary Keimig's blog), though, so this one can just sit and wait until I want to speak to it again.

Final After Critique

I intensified some of the elements of this painting and reworked some of the foothills area back by the mountains and liked it better. I brought it to the Vanguard Artists meeting Friday and received some valuable critiques from the members, as well as visiting artist Julie Gilbert Pollard. Since I am considering this a study for a future larger painting of this scene, I find critiques such as these invaluable.

Utah Desert - WIP

Here is the painting I did as a demo in the mentoring session yesterday afternoon. It, after seeing it on the monitor, does not quite look finished to me so I will fiddle with (I mean refine) that foothills area in the background a bit more and then see what I think. I used a combination of transparent watercolor and gouache for this, it was fun working with it.

If anyone sees anything else that needs more work, have at it and let me know....

Sunset Anvil I

This is a painting I did yesterday at the watercolor session at the art club. I had so much fun yakking with my art budz while I slapped on the paint that I strayed from what I know to be true...when one is glazing for intense colors one must let each glaze dry completely or one achieves mud. The mud in this painting is certainly colorful, but I will start this again and do it correctly this time.

This painting is based on a wonderful photo by my NM Jeep Tours buddy, Roch, who allows me to paint from his great photos. I loved most the varied and wonderful sunset colors in this anvil cloud, but that didn't translate into this painting. Alas, as I said, I will do this again when my focus is more on the painting itself and I allow each glaze to dry properly.

What I like about this painting, other than that wonderful purple-y color, is that I loosened up and let the painting happen. I will, in my serious attempt, focus on the compositional changes needed to make this a good painting and I do know what those are.

This painting was painted for a 24 x 36 inch frame.

Paradise Found

When we added the studio on to the back of our house a few years ago, we had to have a large mesquite tree removed. We were at a local nursery to order a new one to replace that one (we got a Southern Live Oak) and I saw this lone Bird of Paradise blooming beautifully among the closed blooms. It happened to be backlit at the time and my trusty purse-size camera was quickly locked and loaded for this shot. I love having a small camera along for serendipitous moments such as this was, this camera has a higher megapixel rating than my big DSLR!

Anyway, my mentorees should be watching for this photo to appear in a painting near them!

Sandy's Bridge

My mentoring class painted this painting yesterday afternoon. This was painted last year for my classes with permission from Sandy Maudlin. I saw this on her blog, then, and thought it was such a wonderful example of painting with a limited palette of two complementary colors, and the importance of using darks to make the scene glow. Once again, we found this to be true.

The above paintings were all done by the students with the exception of one. I will not identify which painting belongs to which mentoree, nor will I identify which was painted by me. I don't want any viewers to think that any of the mentoree paintings are better than the mentor's!

Thanks once again, Sandy! You are just the best!

Grandmas' Heritage

Yesterday, I did a photo shoot of this set up. It represents something I have wanted to paint for a long time. I am the proud recipient of some wonderful artifacts from both of my grandmothers, as well as one great-grandmother. I have put off painting this, however, because of the daunting detail and not feeling I was up to the challenge yet. However, I decided to go ahead and commit to painting this here on the blog, like everyone will bug me about keeping at it once I start! I will be in a three-artist show in July and will need a few more large southwestern paintings before I work wholeheartedly on this one, but if I get all of that detail (!) drawn on the full sheet of paper, I can pick it up now and then and work on it. Go slowly, Susan!

The quilt was made for me by my paternal grandmother, every stitch is evenly spaced by hand and I still remember the garments from which many of these scraps are from! The sewing machine was my maternal grandmother's, I researched it online and it was manufactured in Secaucus, NJ in 1922. The cow cookie jar was in my paternal grandmother's house, next door to ours while I was growing up, and she would make extra buttermilk biscuits every morning and put a couple of them in this jar for us to have after school. No microwave ovens to heat things then, but I still remember the taste and texture of her biscuits, cold and with butter and jam for an after-school treat! The almost-hidden cake stand (under the doily) was my maternal great-grandmother's. The doily from that side of the family, also. The teapot on top of the cake stand was won for my mother by her mother, tossing softballs at milk bottles at a County Fair! How cool is that?

Don't give up on me in this endeavor, I am determined to paint it!

Diane Maxey at AAG

I, and four of my SCG artist friends traveled to Phoenix Tuesday night for the monthly Arizona Artists Guild meeting. This month's meeting included a demonstration by the famed Diane Maxey. I took many photos, and will share a few here. She brought several paintings that had purportedly been in the back of a closet for awhile because they were BORRRRRING (her intonation) and worked her magic on them for the demo. Of course, any of us would have been thrilled to create something even close to her boring paintings! Her reds are to die for, so vivid and eye-catching. It was a good evening and we all enjoyed the demo and seeing her again. The last demo I caught of hers was at an Arizona Watercolor Assoc. meeting several years ago, she painted geraniums then. Red of course! To quote her from the first demo I watched of hers...if it ain't got red in it it ain't worth paintin'!, this said in her Texas accent.

Pears in Silver

Back to the painting! This is a demo painting I did in yesterday's mentoring class. The focus was on creating the somewhat shiny look of old silver, which takes on the colors of its surroundings as well as modeling of the pears and bowl shapes. They also were encouraged to be brave and try some spattering on the background after they had finished the paintings. I showed them the great trick of applying clear Contact paper over the dry painting, then carefully cutting around the fruit and bowl shapes, lifting the excess Contact paper and then spattering with a toothbrush to create some texture in the background. They were just sure I was going to cut into my w/c paper, but thankfully I did not. So far, I have had success with using this Contact paper technique and haven't cut the paper yet. I hope I don't break that streak any time soon!

This was a simple painting but fun to do and you always learn something when you tackle a painting, I think this was my fourth time to paint this one.