Jennifer Love Artwork BLOG

Watercolor demonstration. Marigold

Summertime!  I'm one of those moms who actually loves summer break. I love letting my kids sleep in rather than trying to drag them out of bed every morning (when I am also tired and completely empathize with their lack of motivation!). I love that we can stay up later doing family movies, game nights, and going to the local amusement park together. I also love summer mornings. I start most mornings and end most evenings with a check on my garden. I'm trying some new crops this year (carrots and potatoes). Last year, I grew watermelon and cantaloupe for the first time. I got two big watermelons off my vines, and seven or eight cantaloupes. They were all DELICIOUS! We also love to grow pumpkins every year for decorating and Jack-O-Lanterns in the Fall.  We are in our second year of a severe drought, and this year our irrigation water restrictions are even more strict. Only one day per week to water the entire yard, and for only 40 minutes. Ergh! I've got my DIY rain barrel...

It's Spring here in Utah. One of my favorite seasons of the year. I love the color and blossoms that are coming out. There are little chutes of green poking through the ground...and the tulips are starting to color. Hopefully the deer will leave them alone this year! After a rainy week (thankfully - as we need the water!), we had a little sunshine this afternoon and I spent a few hours out working in my garden. The garlic I planted last October is growing. Today, I planted carrots and potatoes, laid out my plans for where to plant crops, and put together a few more raised beds. Some parts of the yard and garden are full of sticker weeds...ergh! I'm trying to make my yard and garden organic, so I'll have to figure out how to take care of that without weed killer. Always a challenge to deal with!! My garden and my art studio are my happy places. I love the growing season. Gardening is an exercise in patience...in seeing sometihing awesome come out of hope and hard work. It...

Great news! I've been working hard to expand my art business and have just launched a brand new art gallery website. I'm celebrating with a giveaway and a special launch promotion.  www.jenniferloveartwork.com  is the new home for my artwork. There, you'll find my available originals, as well as prints on a variety of media types from paper to canvas and metal, greeting cards, and more. New work will be added frequently! My new website also has a special feature you should know about: The Wall Preview Tool  allows you to visualize my art in a sample room. You can select the room type and even choose your paint color to get a better feel for how large a given piece is and how it will look on your wall.  Click here  to try it out.  I'm so excited to take this next step with my art business, thanks to the support of my followers and collectors like you. So here's my way of saying "thanks" for keeping up with my art: To celebrate, I'm giving away...

Besides working on new paintings for next March's Art & Soup event and trying to coordinate the many spinning cogs and wheels of the Utah Watercolor Society as we started our 2017-2018 UWS year, I was also able to take a couple of days in early August to attend a plein air workshop in Logan, UT with the incredibly talented Brienne Brown . Now, as you know if you've followed my blog for a while, I am not much of a plein air painter. But, it was lovely to get outside for a couple of days and to spend time with Brienne and the other participating artists. What a beautiful state we have here! Here is my plein air setup and the little sketch I did for my painting on the second day (the painting didn't turn out so well!) Here is the wonderfully talented Brienne... In mid-August, I also attempted to take my family camping in a cabin at Moon Lake Resort in the Ashley National Forest. As it turns out, my husband and sons are not so into the "great outdoors...

Spring in Utah brings a rainbow of beautiful blooms. I love walking through my yard daily to see what new flowers and colors have popped out! We've had an especially rainy May this year and my yard is loving it! Some of my roses, iris, peonies, and weigela bush I draw a lot of inspiration from the spring and summer seasons and am always thinking about new bushes or bulbs I might want to plant in my yard next to keep the array of colors going through the summer. Roses are one of my favorites. They give and give all season long...and they remind me of my grandmother, who always had stunning rose patches and won several city beautification awards for her yard. Some of my roses, weigela bush, and peonies The beautiful fuschia pink roses in my front yard are from a bush that I started from a small cutting off one of my grandmother's bushes. Incidentally, fuschia happens to be my favorite color - ever since I was a teen. I thought it was especially fitting that, o...

What I love about mid-March in Utah are the sure signs of Spring that seem to appear almost overnight. Beautiful sunrises and sunsets. SUN in general! Daffodils blooming, buds appearing on my lilacs, leaves on my butterfly bushes, and tulips poking out of the ground in my flower beds! Our house is West-facing, so the tulips are always coming up later than most of the neighbors, but they also bloom later, so I have flowers longer. :) I have found, over the past few years, that I increasingly crave the sunlight and find the gray days and dark nights of Winter to be increasingly depressing for me. There are some sunshine days that are beautiful in Winter, and I see the beauty there. But, the lack of light and the prevalence of gray make the overall season more and more difficult. So, as Spring approaches, the light increases, the flowers start popping out, and the weather starts warming up, I feel more cheerful, more energetic, and more inspired! Today, the temperatures are warm, my k...