A garden on a power pole

This week's project was transforming the telephone pole in front of the house on Yukon Street.  There is a lot of graffiti in the neighborhood and recently people have begun to take back the poles by painting them with designs and images.  I spent a lot of time thinking about what to paint on the pole. It's right in front of the house and so anything painted on it has to work with house as a background.


I decided to paint a garden of hollyhocks.  It took me three days to complete it.  Here's how it evolved.

I wanted a blue sky background so began by painting the pole blue with some white clouds.  Then the sketch of the flowers.  Even Harry got into the act with paintbrush.   first attempt was garish and floaty but we kept working on it.

On the second day I added more dark at the bottom to ground the pole and then made the flowers at the top smaller and added more buds.

On day three I refined the colors and attempted a bit of shading. The final touch was the flying bird.

There still needs to be more detail around the bottom but I think it's close to finished.  It's not exactly what I had pictured in my head but I think it's an improvement over the original ugly power pole.  If I get tired of it I can simply paint over it with a color to match the house--but for now I like the garden on the power pole.  Soon I'll take your on a tour of the other arty power poles in Fernwood.

One simple bowl

The other day I took 57 photographs of this bowl.  I'm taking an online course through Find Your Eye Photography to learn the ins and outs of my new digital camera.  Our first assignment was to photograph something in many different types of lighting.  From the 57 photos I selected these three as versions that I liked.

It's surprising how much I've learned about my camera and about finding the light in photographs through this exercise.  I knew that it was all about the light but I didn't realize just how many different ways it can affect the image.  I'd been taking photos of things on my kitchen counter in the harsh halogen lights and wondering why the photographs didn't look like what I saw through the viewfinder. Now I'm beginning to discern some of the reasons.

This little handmade bowl was given to me by a Japanese student I tutored some time ago and it's really lovely.  It's simple and unassuming and I think I could keep taking pictures of it for a long time.  I'm recalling a book I read once by a woman who chronicled her attempts to draw a simple bowl and the things she discovered along the way.   Amazing what can be learned from a simple bowl!

What gave rise to "Occupy Wall Street"

Click on the image to enlarge it so you can read the captions.  This says it all!

White grape jelly

This year our most recently planted grape vine overwhelmed us with lovely fruit.  Sorry, I can't tell you what kind of grape it is because it was given to me a couple of years ago.  The grapes were planted for their appearance as they climb over a little arbor on the side of the garden shed. 

We never even thought they'd taste good--but they do.  They're really sweet and tasty.  

I picked three big boxes of them to give away and there were still some left over.  In the end I decided to make grape jelly with the leftovers.  I did this last year with grapes from my other vine so I knew what to do.  It's really not that hard.

Pick the grapes, wash the grapes, put them in a pan and mash them, then place in the jelly bag to drain their juice overnight.

The next morning, boil the juice up with pectin and sugar, put in the sterilized jars--and you're done!

Here's what the finished product looks like.  Isn't that a lovely color?  And I have to say that this jelly is absolutely delectable.  Don't you wish you were on my Christmas list?

Complementary colors

Over at the Kat Eye View blog, she's exploring the color wheel and creating dynamic color schemes using complementary colors and triadic variation.

A true complementary scheme uses colors from opposite sides of the color wheel.  Like orange and blue shown here (from Venice).

Or red and green like this one (from the farmhouse we stayed at just outside of Lucca).

Triadic variation is using two of the three colors in a triad on the color wheel.  Could be blue and red, orange and purple, or (as here) orange and green.  

As you know, I love color and was happy to go through my archives and discover some examples of these colors in my photos from Italy.  This one was taken at the Campo di Fiori market in Rome.

Kat is doing a series on Exploring with a Camera at her very excellent blog.

Some photos of Italy

Just going through some of the photos from our trip to Italy for a slide show I'm preparing.  These are a few of my favorites.