Snow day: Recipe and Painting!

May I share the easiest crockpot recipe I have found YET?! I had a snow day yesterday and desperately wanted the comfort of the crock pot bubbling away. I had absolutely no ingredients and thanks to my roommate keeping orange soda in her car (random!) I was able to make this chicken dish.

"Orange Chicken"

Chicken

1 can orange soda

Soy Sauce, 1/2 cup or so?

That's it.

Cook on LOW 5-6 hours or so..I let it go 6 hours and the chicken was slightly dry. I also threw in some rice and frozen stir fry veggies for the last hour for more substance---Quite yummy!

The snow day also freed up plenty of time to paint. Seeing such a gray, slushy day out the window prompted me to use very bright bold colors! The picture is from a hiking/camping trip I took with my girls in Harpers Ferry, WV last year. It is a BEAUTIFUL town with so much history! I highly recommend it for a weekend camping trip. The KOA was a mile or two away from the town. We walked on roads to the town and then discovered a trail to take back to the campground!!

The green hill in the foreground is actually a graveyard dating from before the civil war--gravestones coming soon. We hiked up so many of stairs and a very rocky trail to get to the top of this hill, and despite clouds of gnats, the view was amazing!! I could do a whole body of paintings from pictures I took on that camping trip. The water you see in between the mountains is the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers merging, I believe...http://www.nps.gov/hafe/index.htm

Should I keep the painting this simple? Hmmm!

Studio Space!

This little "nook" in my townhouse, although cramped, makes for a near-perfect studio! Complete with window garden, antique tea set, and seashell collection :P

Friday was a mandatory-work-from-home-teacher-work-day, which I spent painting, of course. It was so nice and sunny I couldn't resist taking a picture. Rarely do I get to paint with natural daylilght during the winter months--what a treat!! My fellow art teacher and very close friend and I were discussing apartments, townhouses, roommates, etc. and deemed A.S.S. (Art S!@# Space, or Art Stuff Space, rather) an absolutely necessary part of any living arrangement. Perhaps we should come up with a different acronym?!

Update on the Italian Cafe Window!

Little by little I am finishing up "Cafe Window in Italy"--a wedding present/commission for a co-worker friend! It has been tricky because in the photograph itself, the window is slightly crooked AND off center which totally fools with my eyes when I am trying to even out the window frame and shutters. I also need to add some warmer colors for a more glowing effect. Can't wait to go home and work on it this afternoon. After some yoga of course!

And now for some random teaching tidbits---

• Preschool girls should NOT be wearing eye-liner.
• Why do my 6th graders confuse a wedding shower with a bachelor party with strippers? OH DEAR. I do believe when I was in 6th grade I knew nothing, thought even kissing was icky and decided I would just shake hands when I got married......
• Apparently the tree branches I cut out look like "tree pants."
• I can make a very nice olympic torch out of cellophane and construction paper!
• Me to new student:" Hi! I'm Miss Fontaine! What's your name?"...New Student: "Amen" ...Me: "What was that???!"
• One of my students just got an "asthma TV" at home (I guess being on free/reduced lunch does free up the budget a bit)
• Two students at lunch eating corn on the cob: Student 1:"I like to put ketchup and cheese on my corn on the cob.".. Student 2: "EW"...Student 1: "It's Spanish, you should try it!" Student 2: "Well black people don't eat corn on the cob that way" And there you have it!

Have a super Wednesday!

Happy Friday!

New painting for sale on Etsy soon! I started this one in the fall and had never done a painting quite like this before. For once, I didn't work from a photograph...I worked from the everyday fall trees that I noticed here, there, and everywhere. The trees are uniform, simple, and not too detailed. And the canvas itself is unstretched and unprimed--a scrap I had folded up on the shelf. Without gesso, the paint soaks right into the canvas and stays quite bright even when layered! I love the look of the unprimed canvas and frayed edges so I left a good amount of it unpainted and exposed.... I'm thinking this would look even more gorgeous custom framed--Where's that 60% off coupon when you need it?!

Happy Friday :D

New Year--New/Old painting

Posted today on Etsy!! It has been SO bitter cold these days (for VA at least) that I am desperately missing warm summer days. (And I just booked a trip Vermont for Spring Break--brrrr....) I painted this still life last year in June or July and the flowers in the painting I picked from my teensy yard and deck garden!

No school until next year!! Thank you snow :)

Hmm it is 11:21 on a Monday morning..I am still in my pjs, drinking coffee and perusing the internet. With up to 2 feet of snow, they canceled school today, tomorrow, and our half day Wednesday. ..Not that the students would be missing out too too much! This close to holiday break, it is best to take advantage when the librarian runs "Polar Express" 3 times a day on the school TV circuit, not to mention having endless amounts of holiday themed "arts" and crafts to further occupy the children. They are probably having a blast in the snow--hopefully they all have warm coats, hats, and gloves-- and missing school only because they couldn't get their ceramic projects to take home from their fabulous art teacher!! I love living in an area that can't handle any weather worse than rain! Makes a winter storm that much more exciting....

As far as the holiday hubbub...I sent Christmas cards last week and have so far shipped any presents that need shipping and only have a few painting projects to finish as gifts (which is what I SHOULD be doing right now!) Pictures coming soon! I do believe then I only have ONE painting that I will be working on for someone else. Time to get creative--more pencil/ink drawings, more spontaneous paintings, more random still-life drawings/paintings. I have an entire stack of photos that I have been saving to paint and so many blank canvases (I tend to buy them whenever they are on sale) begging for attention..

And tonight---shall I make a Thai stir fry? PW and I found this great little Thai cookbook at Marhsalls a few months ago. We discovered that you need some very interesting ingredients to make Thai. For example PW was very hesitant to buy an entire $5 jar of "sesame oil" when the recipe only needed 1/2 teaspoon. I keep telling him--hey soon we'll have ALL these weird ingredients--but every new recipe calls for some random sauce or paste that we don't have yet that involves 10 laps around the grocery store to find :P oh well. Maybe I'll do something simpler --pork chops and mashed potatoes?!

Stay warm!!!

Just sold!

And the Christmas season prompts another sale!

You Can Almost Hear The Ocean

photo print

8 X 10

YES! Check out my Etsy shop where more beautiful artwork is available for purchase!!!