St. Finian's Bay - SOLD! and your invitation to Ireland!

8"x10" oil on linen mounted on archival panel

St. Finian's Bay is one of my favorite places to paint.  First of all, it usually involves a trip to the Skellig Chocolate factory, just across the street, close by.  Secondly, it has a wonderful beach where really tough, brAve hearty souls go to swim and surf! I've been there on cloudy days, misty days, and sunny days (and of course days that have every weather event involved...and it's always beautiful!  This one sold at our "Wet Painting Sale" on Valentia Island, to a repeat collector who lives on the island. 

It was a WONDERFUL week! Barbara Mastaglio, our host for planning our week through Valentia Island Art Retreats knows this region so well, keeps us painting at some really great locations! 

Mary and Jim Lane, who own and run Shealane B&B do a superb job of keeping us well fed and rested, and keep us headed in the right direction with any question we might have.  This was my sixth time over to visit and paint, Mary and Jim have become like family.  And Barbara I would claim for a sister at any time.

We do hope you'll join us next summer - I'll be offering a workshop there. You'll gain great tips on improving your decision making skills in the great outdoors, make faster and stronger starts to your painting, so you'll have that roadmap to a great finish.  Learn to strengthen your composition for a truly compelling painting, and "finding your voice" in your painting career.

I've just finished downloading all my photos from the adventure- and I'll share them here on the blog. You'll also hear it from me, what I got snagged in security for! (and it wasn't a pile of rocks)!   

  

Brilliant LIght Over Portmagee and Puffin Island; I'm off to paint in Ireland!

Click here to bid!

Just the thought of Ireland evokes so many thoughts for her children that have emigrated to all points of the world. Within those of us...there is a longing perhaps...an internal memory of those rolling green hills, laid out before us like a rumpled bolt of green velvet fabric.  Do you hear it calling? 

September is my birthday month, and in anticipation of that as WELL as this trip to Ireland, my gift to you is this opportunity. I have some special offerings on some 'paintings from the vault'. Some of the few remaining paintings of Ireland that I have done over the last few years. If you missed out, follow the above link (the one that says 'click to bid'). It will take you to several ebay listings and I'll be adding several over the next few days!  Spreading some birthday love with no wrinkles added!

I am finally packed,,,,,okay, okay, all except for my carry-on. That is always the last minute 'sit and stuff'. I've figured out which jackets, which sweaters, pants, socks, and most important, which paints and which size panels! 

Which brings to mind- how does any one actually wear clothes and paint big canvases....and not pay HUGE airline fees for bringing an over-sized suitcase or an extra suitcase? "Mr. Travel" - aka Rick Steves obviously does not haul along painting gear!  

Yesterday I had everything placed in a super-large suitcase and still had room left! (WHAT? when does that ever happen?). I still had enough room for one of my shorter neighbors and her dog, too.  I was thinking this was looking rather too large. I vaguely recalled something on a recent AerLingus email about luggage sizes and limits, so I went back to find the information. Holy cow! Glad I did- the limit is 62" and under 50 pounds. Well, I hadn't gone over 50 pounds yet, but I was wondering about that size limit. Turns out it is length + width + depth.  Well, this suitcase was a good deal over. I looked up what the fine/penalty/fee/gouging was to be??? Yikes - $100. A hundred bucks ? No way. So the un-packing ensued...and re-packing began, into a medium sized suitcase. (Didn't the three bears have an adventure like this?).

So the dreaded packing part is pretty much over. Tomorrow, hubby delivers me to the airport. I've made chili & roast chicken for him to have a few leftovers. Then he resorts to the Indian restaurant and the BBQ place for the rest of my trip. They have become like family and know us quite well now. The guy who owns the BBQ restaurant saw me in the grocery store one day and said, "Hey, you must've been out of town again, your husband was in here for dinner three times last week!".  Poor guy! It does work out better when my trusty art assistant gets to come along!  

I do you hope you'll follow along on the adventure! Here's hoping I have a good wi-fi connection so I can share the scoop with you! Get ready for a little armchair travel adventure. I'm bringing my watercolor postcards along, too...could there be some gifts involved for you? Why, yes! Make sure you are signed up for this blog (see the upper right hand column to enter your email address), so it arrives in your email inbox and keeps your name in the hat to win a watercolor postcard from Ireland! I'm so grateful to my loyal blog readers, I always love the input, and sharing thoughts and ideas with you! 

Cliffside Sunbathing in Irish Wool (sold) - returning to Ireland!

This painting is already sold, but you might find some other available Ireland paintings here.

So, I'll be packin' up my bags shortly. Pulled the big suitcase out of the basement this morning. I'm trying to decide upon whether to take panels to paint on, or cut pieces of canvas.  I've got a nice roll of oil primed linen, and a friend of mine recommended taking cut pieces of linen taped to foam core board or gator-board to paint on.   It makes for a much lighter load with them unmounted. What he does with the wet pieces on his way home is to stack them, with a piece of corrugated cardboard with a window hole cut out of it, in between each piece...so that each painting is not touching another. When all the pieces are stacked and separated it's still pretty light...but - I'm thinking this still takes up a lot of space in your suitcase AND would cause me to take up more time cutting card-board, just to get ready.   Plus, just looking at layers of cardboard (in my shipping closet) that adds up to a pretty thick stack.  I think my methods I've been using for the last decade have served me quite well.  

I keep the paintings relatively small, 8x10 linen covered panels are my favorite.  I also like to bring 6x8s and 9x12s and sometimes 12x12s.  Over the years I've collected a slew of panel boxes. Various makers make some great sturdy boxes.  The lightest ones are made by Raymarart.com.  Check them out here!

I've been going through my supply of paints. I bag them up in zip-lock bags by color. I have two batches, one group that I will use up first, and if I run out of any color, I carry a back-up supply in a separate zip-lock bag. I try to pack those baggies in between a soft, cushy sweat -shirt so that the tubes won't get mashed or damaged. I pack them in the suitcase that goes with the checked luggage.  I'm taking more than I used to on this trip. I've been using a bigger variety of transparent colors than I used to as an under painting, so that takes up a bit more space. But I'm excited about what I'll be painting this trip, as the last time I went over was 2009. 

My carry-on luggage piece is actually my painting back-pack. Once I arrive at my B&B, I'll re-organize my equipment from suitcase to back-pack, so that each day I'll have my gear handy.  It's usually the "getting -there" that is a hassle (ie- packing). Once you arrive at your destination, the fun finally begins! 

I've got myself a card-reader for my ipad, so I'm hoping to blog via my iPad and not lug my laptop over there! Gosh, I've learned a lot already, just planning for this trip. Now lets see if I can put it to good use! 

I've got a special request already for some sheep paintings! My previous trips over to Ireland have been mid-summer, June and July when the lambs are still fairly tiny. I have no idea what they'll look like in September. They're so cute when they're tiny- yet they can spring up in the air as though they had springs in their little legs! It's been hard not to try to sneak one on board to come home with me. I guess it would be hard to pass one off as a service animal..."Yes, sir, that's my 'seeing-eye-sheep', quite the trooper"! I'm sure I'd get busted in security for that! 

I do hope you'll follow along on the adventure! These views are some of my favorite on the planet! Make sure you don't miss a thing by filling in your email address in the box at the top right hand column that says: GET MY LATEST PAINTINGS EMAILED TO YOU DAILY!  Each new blog post and painting will show up in your inbox each morning! 

 

Summer Morning, Ebb Tide Marsh and Packing for Plein Air Travel

6"x8" oil on linen mounted on panel

For more information, or to purchase, click here.  

Summer mornings of acid-lemon green grass

shimmering in warm air.

Sunlight is melting through the trees -

cresting the upper most branches. 

The heat doesn't pass the treeline...

not until the sun arcs over the tops.

Then the marsh wakes up

alive with noise...

a 'quiet noise' of its own nature...

bugs, birds, breeze.

And I have captured my prize, 

and am on my way home. 

Do you have a refuge? A place you love to go, to "get away from it all"? Hopefully it's got a better view than your basement! What a good excuse to get out into nature. Away from cell-phones, deadlines, commitments. They will all be there anyway, waiting for your return. Having a refuge (especially one that's not much further than your back yard or neighborhood) is a good way to balance life!

Now, how to balance packing?? At this point in the summer, after much travel and toting my gear around locally, I need to sit down and re-organize my back-pack. (Yikes! You can see what a wreck it is now!) This little bag has been SO handy. It's a little rolling back-back I bought at Walmart for about $35 many years ago.  And yes, it has been used as carry-on on some air-travel trips and checked baggage on other airline trips.  It's taken a beating and still survived. But it's just the right size for making you keep your gear light so that you can carry it on your back if you need to, OR roll it on its wheels with the handle extended if you wish to do that.  I usually carry bug-spray, baby-wipes, paper-towels, bull-dog clips, plastic grocery bags for trash, a painting apron to keep clean as possible and have pockets handy, a wide-brimmed sun hat with a cord/strap if it gets windy. 

For my paints I take one tube of each color that I'll need. For trips lasting several days to a week, where I'll be doing a lot of painting, I'll bring two tubes of the colors that I tend to use a lot of: ultramarine blue, cad lemon yellow, and Titanium white (or a large tube of T. white). For longer trips I'll take two sets of my paint colors, each set bagged separately.  For some locations, it's not possible to go buy new paints if you run-out. I always put them in zip-loc baggies, just in case one of them starts to leak or ooze. You just never know. Anything I can do to help stay clean is the better way to go. For now, I bag up reds together, blues together in their own bag, and then yellows in their bag, etc.  For the longest time I'd only use a warm and a cool of each primary, plus white.  At this point, I do like to carry along some transparent colors to use as under-painting.

 Also, Guerilla Paintbox is running a special (33% off & free shipping) recently on their little Mighty-Mite brush cleaner- (that green lidded thing below). It's small and handy enough to fit in tight spaces.

I've recently learned to pack a pair of wind-pants in the front pocket of my pack during certain parts of the year. It can be bitter cold in some areas if the wind picks up, and they are light and don't take up too much room. 

So the thoughts are how to do this with as little weight to haul to the airlines, yet have only as much gear as you truly need!

In my brush pack here, you can see that I've been suffering from a recent case of B.A.D. (brush acquisition disorder). No I don't need all these with me on my upcoming trip! 

I'll keep my canvases fairly small on this trip. Usually when I'm flying I keep my panel sizes under 9x12...and 8x10s have been a big favorite of mine.  Below is one of my favorite products: Raymar art panels. When they came up with the thinner, lighter weight panels called "Feather Lite", what a difference that made. It doesn't look like much, but those panels weigh a lot when they're all stacked up together. I love their oil primed canvases, but they do make a nice smooth finish acrylic gessoed canvas that's less expensive yet still has a nice surface to work on.Oh, and that funny looking grey plastic box in the first picture of gear is one of Raymar's wet-panel holders. It's for 8x10s but will hold 8x8s or 8x6s as well. It's a great little holder and VERY light weight. That's the best way of getting those wet paintings back home!

So, along with all these gadgets, I take bull-dog clips (did I mention those already?)

They are handy for clipping your trashbag onto something so that it's not flapping in the wind (so annoying), or anything else you might want to clip down tight. They are handy. I usually bring 2 to 3 of those.

Last of all, I have 2 favorite travel easels.  I love the medium size Artbox & Panel setup that I have, but to really scale down light I've been using an OpenBoxM - the small 8x10 size. It fits into this back-pack really well, and is light-weight, but big enough to handle an 8x10, 9x12, possibly larger, but those are the sizes that I work in with this when I'm keeping things as light as possible.  

 The tripod that I use with it has its own carrying case, so I throw that over my shoulder as well, when I need to hike in to my location. 

There it is in the long black zip-bag. This is the only piece that doesn't fit into my back-pack. When I fly, I put this piece in my regular suitcase that goes with the checked luggage.  It's relatively light as far as tripods go, but it's pretty sturdy. It's a SLIK F740 (see the ArtBoxandPanel website).  I've had other tripods that have been disastrously difficult to use, or too heavy or too light. This one is 'just right'. 

 So your mission, if you choose to accept it....is to watch me take this mess and organize it into something I can travel with next week!

Summer Sketchbook Scenes; Ireland vistas & plein air travel......

"Every summer has a story, but this year, it's more like a novel."

So much has happened this summer - and mostly good, some of it even grand; and the not so good, well, it's forgettable.  

I love savoring those grand moments, whether they were big or small.  From first blossoms on a new plant, a new pumpkin on the vine, to a far-away travel destination, a new recipe success, and a fun visit with an old friend; watercolor sketchbook journaling from the garden.

As summer winds to an end, I'm thinking of plans for this fall.  A bit of travel (a place that I've been to many times, but not for several years- Ireland!!) So, share this blog post with your friends, I'd like to grow my Facebook Page, to share the journey of Ireland! 

My wonderful artist assistant (hubby) will be "holding down the fort" at home, so in the coming days, I'll be figuring out how to pack as light as humanly possible since he won't be there to help me haul stuff or get it in his suitcase through the airport! I've been on plenty of plein air trips; several of them overseas. Each time I learn a few new tricks and tips that make it a bit easier.