This week: Bubbles

 I'm sure I've tried to paint bubbles before but when I tried to find the post about it I could not. I have not tagged very consistently, I fear.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure these bubbles are better, and they are certainly much bigger.

I had this old landscape hanging about which I had painted years ago and abandoned half-made as boring, so I re-painted the sky - which has lost some detail by being photographed, because of course it has, the distant mountains and the foreground shadow, and then tried sticking some bubbles over it, since most of the rest of the class were still doing droplets, but I'd got bored with those.  I decided to keep some of the images reflected in the bubbles in my reference photos, and just adapt them a bit to suggest they were reflecting things other than the background.  Pan-dimensional bubbles?  Bubbles in the space-time continuum?  Something like that! 

Bluebells & willow-seeds

I went for a long walk over Dartmoor last weekend and must dig out the photos.  Too hot for a long walk today, but in the shadow of the woods the bluebells are at their peak, and the sunny fields are white and golden with lady's smocks and buttercups.

The willow-trees are seeding, too, a million tiny fluff-seeds floating lazily through the air.  When you are walking through the bluebell woods in sunlight, this is lovely thing to see, the seeds catching the light and turning golden.

We have been watching the Stranger Things TV series recently.  It's very good!  It's set in a 1980's small American town, and features 80's music, children playing D&D,  plus some dark-ish horror fantasy elements, with really interesting writing and beautifully layered characterisation, (though as always with American series that feature some 'high school' children, I always wonder if the 'high school' bits are supposed to look quite as horrifyingly dystopian as they appear to my eyes...)

Anyway, the series uses tiny drifting dots of fluff and gloomy blue lighting to indicate that the characters have moved from the 'normal' world to the dark horror fantasy world, and I admit when I came out of the pet-shop the other day, having gone into the shop in sunlight with people all around, to find that dark blue clouds had rolled across the sky, the car park was now completely deserted, and tiny willow-fluffs were still blowing in vast numbers through the air, it did give me a moment's pause. :-D