Beautiful country here in West Virginia.

Sunsets can always inspire. Though they are very hard to capture with even the best equipment.

Date taken: December 20-24, 2008

There isn’t much of an inspiring story behind either of these pieces. The orchids painting was a lesson from a Japanese watercolor painting book that Eliza picked up for me. The birch tree I wanted to do because, for whatever reasons, birch trees are some of my favorite trees.

I plan on doing this same orchid painting at least a few more times.  The techniques in the book are beyond both my abilities and, I think, the abilities of my brushes. My watercolor brush set isn’t of the highest quality. In order to have the reeds, or leafs, in this painting be much better than they are in this first try – I will need to get the technique down.

I’m fairly pleased with how this piece came out. It took me about 3 and 1/2 hours to complete the painting, since I had to allow the paint do dry between “coats”. My impatience near the end is probably what caused the tree, specifically the trunk, not to turn out exactly like I wanted to. Less a problem of technique and more a problem of patience on this one.

I’m looking forward to doing many more this winter. My goal is to get good enough at watercolor to make a piece that I want to hang in our apartment.

Date taken: August 23, 2008 | Trees dying in a swamp.

Under I-78 between Hellertown and Bethlehem, PA the trees are blooming.

It has my permission to go away now.

Date taken: October 20, 2007 | A pretty well picked patch of large pumpkins.

Date taken: October 20, 2007 | Not sure what all the fuss was about. I mean, it was just a pole.

Date taken: August 20, 2007 | Left: Heading to a better spot. Right: Holding onto its color. (info)

At the scenic overlook Carbondale, Pa

Eliza and I had our first “photo day” today. We’ve been meaning to do this for quite awhile but we’ve not been able to find the time until today. Oh, and the fact that the temperature hit 66-degrees fahrenheit didn’t hurt either.

One of my favorite things is having a great time while not spending a dime. Eliza and I really like taking and having tons of photos, so doing something like this is far overdue I think. After we get a few of these photo days under our belt I’m sure we’ll have some great photos to make some neat projects out of.

We managed to collect a little over 100 really nice photographs and had a blast doing it. Here are a few photos we took – and let me tell you it was extremely hard to narrow it down to just these to show. We traveled through many different towns and stopped in three or four to take photos – I tried to pick a few photos from each of the spots we stopped at.

Tree @ overlook

Thin branches

Windmills

Windmill

Crystal Lake

Burned building

Me shootin'

Melted glass

Cool tree

Mountain

We were going to give each other photo “assignments” where we focus on one type of thing like flowers or animals, but in retrospect I think simply driving to different locations and seeing what we come up with works much better. I look forward to our next photo day.