Bliss is...

A weekend at the beach

A sunny, dreamy, living-in-the-moment, soaking-it-all-up weekend at the beach.

I met this dog. As you can see, we are in love. His human is pretty amazing too. I'm obviously going to have to return soon.

loving my letters

My first workshop at Artfest was with the amazing and lovely Lisa Englebrecht. That's one of her samples above. I love Lisa's work and I was thrilled to see her name on the schedule for Artfest this year. I've always loved words (before I learned to read, I used to write lists of the dozen or so words I knew on my Holly Hobby chalkboard) and I've always been interested in fancy lettering. I've also always had completely atrocious handwriting. I have Lisa's excellent book but I was really in need of some hands-on instruction.

Here I am with the amazing and lovely Lisa. She's an excellent and very generous teacher. The class was Tats, Graff and Freestyle, so in addition to learning Old English and Script styles, we played with some funky styles, thought about what word we loved enough to tatoo on our bodies (major commitment!) and came up with our street names.

My street name is nb3 (for nicolabeverage). I "tagged" on the beach with a piece of driftwood. AFA is my crew: ArtFest Anarchy (All Fabulous Artists, etc). Super fun!

The Pilot Parallel Pen is my new favorite toy. Seriously, these pens are a revelation. They make it SO easy to make letters that look SO cool. Here's some of my experimenting in class.

And here's some freestyle experimenting. Dance was written with glue pen and then foiled.

I've been playing with lettering a lot since I got home, working on developing a personal lettering style. Here's some parallel pen play from the other day.

No lettering here, just a recent journal page inspired by my art sister Cheryl.

Took a hike

Saturday I went on a hike along the Spokane River. I live on a bend in the river, so I just headed out my front door, down to the Centennial Trail and then branched off onto this hiking trail. It was awesome! It felt so good to get out and tramp around in the woods, just listening to the river and the birds.

There's my destination: Bowl and Pitcher, a popular campground at Riverside State Park. The views of the rushing river and massive basalt formations from the rebuilt walking bridge (originally built by the CCC) were well worth the trip.

As were the wildflowers blooming all along the path.

Speaking of birds, here's one of the local osprey trying to lead me away from it's nest.

This tree is only a block away from home, but it smells like heaven right now. Seriously, I could just stand there and smell this tree all day.