2016 In Review
While 2016 may have been negative in terms of events in the news and celebrity deaths, it was an amazing and eventful year for me personally. Here is a recap of some of the things that I have accomplished: Art…
Carolyn A Pappas
Nature and Landscape Art
Carolyn A Pappas
Advent
I always wanted to do a proper advent calendar with my daughter and this year I finally got around to making one. I bought a plain papier mâché box with twenty-five drawers and decorated it with collage, acrylic paint and…
White Christmas at the Château
Recently I got the chance to work on some album artwork for my good friend Robert Louis. He just released his brand new collection of instrumental jazzy Christmas songs, A Robert Louis Christmas. I’ve been playing it in the background…
Selection of Pink Watercolor Flowers
Thanks to my membership at the botanic garden (and multiple visits over the summer), I now have a huge collection of snapshots of beautiful, showy, and unusual (to me) flowers to paint. Today I’m taking a look back at some…
Sticks and Stones
These are some of my daughter’s nature objects that found their way into my bedroom, and then my sketchbook. I made the drawings in watercolor pencils, and then instead of using plain water to activate the pencil marks, I used…
Sketching Rural Scenery
These are some pen and ink sketches I made while sitting on the porch of a beautifully renovated old farmhouse. The late afternoon/early evening light made it a very interesting landscape to draw and observe. When I was drawing the…
Experiment with Bold Ink
My favorite waterproof black fineliners are Staedtler Pigment Liners and I have the four pack in the plastic case. I find that I go for the 0.01 size most often and use the 0.03 size on a limited basis. I…
Working Plein Air at the Moss Steps
I took my watercolors to Tower Hill Botanic Garden to try out working plein air. It was a sunny day and I was worried about getting burned, so I went into the wooded areas. I settled down at the Moss…
Valuable Time Alone for Nature Sketching
To be alone with nature is to be one with nature. -Peter Ewart I was able to get out of the house by myself for a few hours today. I used my time well and made three sketches. It was…
Sleeping Pups
This is my most recent project—my first pet portrait commission. I originally was planning on painting it all in watercolor, but then decided to add colored pencil to give it some more texture. I also changed the color of the…
Decorated Endpapers
I’ve never decorated the front endpapers in any of my previous sketchbooks, although some people make a tradition of it. I decided to give it a try in my new moleskine, by making a series of mini sketches out in…
My thoughts on the new moleskine paper
These are the first two pages I did in my new moleskine (a black one, this time). I immediately noticed a difference in the paper (it was advertised to be improved for paint). A short time ago, Roz Stendahl wrote…