:: Moving is such sweet sorrow ::

I can't possibly put enough emphasis on the words "I've been busy".  Not in the normal everyday sense, but in the pack up and move sense.

In January we decided to move, in February we gathered all of our worldly belongings and moved to Sequim WA.  Sequim, pronounced skwim - like swim only add the sk to the front of the word.  There is a lot of nice things about this area ... We won't experience the Lavender Festival until July but they say Sequim is the Lavender capitol of North America,  another nice thing is that we are in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains and Sequim receives only about 16 inches of rain a year. Wahoo !

While there are plenty of things I could bore you with about the move, and finding a place for things I insisted on bringing with me, I'll just share with you that I've already found a painting partner who has told me a lot about the art community & events that I can become involved in.  Best of all as of last week I now have my studio all set up & I am committed to painting at least 4 days a week.  I hope most of these days will be spent doing some plein air work and also more painting exercises. 

Today my painting exercise was to try matching paint colors.  Last week I picked up a bunch of paint color samples from the local hardware store.  What fun ...  Not that it was real easy but that it made me think,  'should I add yellow to make it warmer, should it be cooler, more intense, grayer?'  It kept me on my toes.  I only had one paint sample that I couldn't duplicate even closely, it was a fuchsia kinda color.  I'll try again.

You can't tell very well where I put my paint dabs on the paint chip samples so in the below photo I've circled each area where I put my mixed paint.  I was very pleased with how well my paint mixtures  matched the samples.