A New Class, My Tea Towel Calendar and Some Tiny Paintings (but not in that order)

I want to thank everyone who voted for my Tea Towel Calendar design in the Spoonflower contest. My design was one of the top 25 and is now available for purchase on Spoonflower's sister site Roostery as a Spoonflower Special Edition Tea Towel. If you're more into DIY, you can also purchase it as fabric on Spoonflower. A fat quarter will give you one tea towel.

Even better, right now until November 9th, fat quarters are buy one get one free on Spoonflower!

Your support and encouragement mean so much to me. I truly appreciate each and every single vote (and every blog comment and every heart on Instagram and on and on. Thank you!!).

This week I debuted a new class on Skillshare. Want a peek?

Leaves are a great subject for watercolor because they are everywhere, giving you no shortage of inspiration. If you're just starting out with watercolors leaves are a great choice because many have very simple shapes. In this new class I demonstrate painting simple leaves (and leaf clusters) using a variety of watercolor techniques which will help you to build your skills.

I'd love to have you join me in class. You can sign up here and if you're not already subscribed to Skillshare I'm offering you an introductory rate of $0.99 for three months. You'll have access to all four of my classes and thousands of others on many different subjects.

The nasturtiums are still barely hanging on in my garden (in the trailer for my new class you get a glimpse one of those plants -- can you spot one of the flowers peeking out from beneath the leaves?) Any day now I'll wake up and find the plants destroyed by frost. It always makes me a bit sad, the end of my garden for the year. One of my repeat customers shared a beautiful thought with me in a recent email. She wrote:

"The nice thing about your paintings is that it's like having a garden year-round to enjoy, especially when you don't have a garden of your own. While the flowers from this summer may be gone, you capture the memory and spirit of them so well it's like a scrapbook with old friends."

I love that! And it made me want to hang a lot more of my paintings around the house.

One thing I've been pondering for a while is how to make use of some of my tiny paintings. I really wanted to do something with my series of miniature nasturtium paintings, but they are so little, only two inches by four inches.

Mounting them on mat board was one idea I had, but I kept forgetting to look into buying mat board. And then I thought, what if I were to mount them on watercolor paper?

So I did. Those four nasturtium paintings are now available in my Etsy shop as are three of my miniature houseplant portraits.

The houseplants are a bit bigger than the nasturtiums, measuring two and a half inches by five inches, but all seven paintings are mounted on five by seven pieces of watercolor paper, ready to slip into standard size frames to coordinate with any decor. A few more options for your year-round garden.

With so much time I've been spending lately in front of a computer screen I'm ready for some time away from it, back with my paints.

Wishing you a wonderful, joy-filled weekend!