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The morning started out with sunshine, two days in a row. Not sure I can take all this brightness 😉

The blinds were drawn in the kitchen, but with the sun shining on them, you could see silhouettes of the birds flying around the bird feeder…driving the cats nuts! Dukes was jumping at the blinds trying to catch the silhouette! I opened the curtain to find two red squirrels feasting on sunflower seeds. I opened the door to let Dukes out. One red quickly departed. The other, however, sat in the feeder, keeping an eye on me. Of course I had my camera and proceeded to take advantage of the situation and get a couple of close-ups before he thought better of the situation and scurried away.

I was in my head tonight while painting, not following intuition. Which means I was forcing things to happen, the perfectionist came out and well…disappointment prevailed.

I was in town today visiting a friend and, on my way back home, I stopped in at DeSerres (art store) to pick up a few art supplies including a masking fluid pen.

Now, I got the idea for this watching a video on Instagram. Since I’ve been posting my photos and paintings there, other artists have started following me and, I in turn, followed them. One had a video showing this technique and I thought it was pretty cool and wanted to try it.

Fast-forward to this evening: I’m watching an old PBS episode of Sue Scheewe that I have saved on my PVR. She’s painting a vase with carnations. She makes it look soooo easy! So… I thought I’d try it.

Back to this morning: I had the idea for a painting: a winter night scene with a quarter moon, Venus and Jupiter. Cool. I’ll stop by DeSerres and get some masking fluid.

And now back to tonight: I put the night scene to the side and decided on the flower vase. It just wasn’t working out. The vase was misshaped. The carnations don’t look anything like carnations, or any other type of flower…well maybe a clover. I was able to do a little bit of correcting. One thing with watercolour – it’s unforgiving. With acrylics, I could get away with a lot more.

Anyhoot. All that to say, I wasn’t overjoyed with the painting so decided to try the masking pen and the night scene. Well….maybe I was having an off day or something but it wasn’t working out either. Maybe I have acrylics on my mind…the colour was really off on the sky and the new brush I picked up today wasn’t working great… but then suddenly I tried something different…painting the sky sideways on an angle. And you know what? It worked. It looked really cool. So I added in some snow, a tree and a couple of friends for the tree (Bob Ross reference) and I really really liked the painting. But then there was the masking fluid that needed to be removed. The moon and planets. Wouldn’t you know it? I couldn’t get the darn stuff off. I tried different things until I finally managed to pull it off, along with part of the paper. (I need to watch a video on how to use this stuff!!!)

So, I had to redo the sky to cover up the large white gaps in it.

Sigh!

It was an interesting night, to say the least! Better days to come.

In retrospect, I’d like to figure out if tonight was a growing experience by trying new things or not going with the flow. I feel a meditation in my near future. 😉

w.