Garden Trailz . . .

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

– Vincent Van Gogh

It has been a lovely week.

The air is just a bit warmer each day and added to the bright sunshine that we have been experiencing, it has been just lovely to head outside and enjoy the day. Spring has definitely arrived in our little corner of the world.

Besides the usual work that my job entails, we have taken time to head out nearly every day this week and take a long walk in our neighborhood. There are so many beautiful places for us to enjoy here. One day we walk through the back trails of the woods, the next we took to the beach and walked along the ocean. The tide was out and the beach was vast and there were probably only about four or five people along the entire stretch. It was both refreshing and inspirational.

With the onset of the warmer weather arriving, I have been thinking about some new designs that I have planned for the spring and summer seasons. I have several choices, as I still have several more songbirds to create for my Songbird Ornament series as well as some more storefronts that I want to do for my North Star Village series. But before I dive back into winter for the village piece, I wanted to do something that would celebrate the new season.

I have had a moderate amount of success with my Snailz Trailz pattern series. For some reason, I just have a great time creating these whimsical little fantasy creatures. Even though I always say that cartoons are not more forte, I seem to have developed a ‘style’ of my own regarding these snails and I have had a really good time ‘dressing them up’ if you will, and making each one comical and unique.

It began with my “Haunted Trailz” series in which I dressed them up for Halloween:

The Halloween crew was so well-received, that I also created ten snails for Christmas (Holiday Trailz) :

More recently, I created a few new snails for Valentine’s or any romantic event called “Romantic Trailz“:

I still had more ideas for that theme, but time was not my friend and I only created three of them. I will keep the others in mind for next year.

So that brings us to springtime. A time when most people are looking forward to being outside after a long winter indoors. A time for fresh air, sunshine, and the garden.

What better way to celebrate the spring than create a fun set of garden snails to enjoy? So I got right to it.

For the past week or so I have been designing and creating the first three snails in my Garden Snailz chapter of snail characters. While I also have ideas for several more garden characters, I decided to stop at three for now and I will be adding more friends for them later.

The three new snails in this series are Sprout – who carries seedlings under his terrarium shell;

“Digger” – who is equipt with all his tools and plants;

and “Fertile Myrtle” – who already has a full can of flowers that bloomed;

I hope you like them all!

I also created a short, two-minute promo video for you to enjoy:

I really have a lot of fun making the promo videos. I guess that is just another form of creating. As I learn the software, I find there are lots of fun effects that can make these videos quite entertaining. I hope you agree.

As always, the patterns and surfaces are available on my Tole Painting Designs website. They are available as PDF downloads or paper. All of them are painted with my favorite DecoArt Americana acrylic paint. You can easily find them at your local craft supplier, or online at the DecoArt website.

In other news, I wanted to share a quick drawing that I did yesterday with you.

A couple of weeks ago, I was gifted a set of Derwent Chromaflow colored pencils. I used colored pencils both as accents with many of my mixed media projects and on their own. I have both the Faber-Castell Polychromo set of pencils as well as Prismacolors, which are both of excellent quality.

I typically wouldn’t be hunting for another line of pencils, but I am always up for trying something new. My friend Tracy works a lot with colored pencils and her artwork is amazing. She has tried many brands and sent me these because she liked them so much.

Since colored pencils are a slower medium to work with (and I am quite slow anyway) I decided to do something simple and small to try them out. I had a sample pad of Stonehenge 140lb cold-pressed paper which is recommended by some of the pencil artists I follow and I thought I would use that.

I chose a simple ladybug on a leaf and wanted to see if I could replicate it by using only the colors in the set. I wound up layering them up pretty much, but I think I did a decent job of matching the colors of the reference.

What do you think?

I found that they blended really nicely. I was able to get several shades of red and even black by layering the colors.

As I mentioned, colored pencil artwork is quite slow. This little picture took me about three hours to do. I did do the blending by applying lots of very light layers, which is a key factor in successfully using pencils for more realistic drawing. I then burnished the colors to blend them. For this small artwork, I did not use odorless mineral spirits to blend the colors, as the areas were quite small. But I think it looks fine as it is.

I really do love Derwent products and I will be doing more with these pencils as well as my Inktense pencils and blocks. They are one of my favorite mediums.

Well, that just about covers things for this week’s blog. I think I am going to switch back to Songbirds and paint another one and then I will be working on my next village shop. I just want to do a bit more spring painting before heading back to winter with the village. It’s all fun, though.

I wish you all a great week.

Until next time . . .