Weekend update

Getting there!

By the way, with all this painting of ordered gardens and roses, I suddenly felt the need to clean up the backyard rose shrub. It was a mess. It had not been pruned in years, so I snipped my way to the core of the plant. Now I am crossing my fingers in hope I did not exceed what's good for next year's blooming. The rose branches look rather neat, now, but my husband expressed a certain level of skepticism at my zealous clipping. I am more optimistic, though. This year we had very few flowers, so I figure next year can only get better.  Let's hope so! :)

Coloring....

Ok, here is the promised update. It's not much, but I am proceeding cautiously. To give you an idea, it took me a couple of hours (while watching Iron Man 3 with my husband...not very poetic or attuned to the theme of the drawing, but time is precious...;)) colored the central  more prominent rose. Now I am getting a bit faster with the other roses, because I figured out the technique I need to use.

I like my roses very much, for once. I liked the fairies very much too at the beginning, but I am not so sure of it anymore. Their skin color is quite flat and I believe I need to work more on it to bring the little creatures to life. BTW, notice that this time I started from the main characters! ;)

Have a great rest of the week!

Winter is coming...

Hi there!

The weather has been rather wintery these past days. Yesterday morning I realized that the magnolia tree that was still splendidly green a couple of days earlier had profoundly felt the change in temperature. Two images came to mind...one of a lady decked in jewels and the other, much more somber, of a very famous Italian poem about the fragility of life...

Si sta come d'autunno sugli alberi le foglie. Here we are like the leaves, in Autumns. So wrote the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti  referring to the condition of the soldiers in the trenches during WWI. They are really just barely hanging in there...

My in-laws have departed and returned to the warmer shores of Italy, we have had to take care of a few things in the house, and I am cautiously coloring my Sub Rosa drawing.
Soon I'll post what I have been doing so far...

Have a warm weekend everybody!

PS: I just realized I had the wrong title on for a while...I changed my mind half way through about what I wanted to talk about and then forgot to modify the title! ;)

Almost done with the inking...

I am looking forward to color this...