My Boots and My Hat

​These two painting may be my favorites simply because I love my boots and hat so much. I'm a country girl at heart and sometimes I wonder why I ever ended up in New England. Of course I only have to look under my own roof to find the answer to that, but still, sometimes, especially in the dead of winter, I kick myself for moving east instead of south.
​I did the painting of my boots first. It was in the spring I remember, because the daffodils in the basket we had brought home from church after an Easter Sunday service. The basket used to sit on my dining table with fruit in it. It's since been replaced by a ceramic fruit bowl. It must have been empty at the time, or I just didn't want fruit in the painting. I'm not sure which. I arranged the items on my patio and took several photos. I was in no way fast enough to complete a painting in one sitting. In fact for the first few years I was averaging about one painting per year. Honestly! I was that slow. It wasn't until I starting taking formal lessons that I began to speed up.
​I enjoyed doing this painting very much. I had thought the leather texture of the boots was going to be hard to capture, but it just kind of happened effortlessly. The basket was a different story. I must have repainted it at least five times. But I was really happy with the final outcome.
​My hat I started when I was visiting my family in Michigan in the summer of 2011. My parents have a beautiful house on Harsens Island. It's one of my favorite places to be. I put my hat on the back of one of my moms porch rockers and placed the rocker in front of one of her flower gardens and took several photos. The hat turned out to be more challenging than I thought it would be and I'm still not really happy with the outcome. I look at it and think, I could do more with that. But I've heard some say that artists always do that. I was very happy with the flowers. I love the color. I took some artistic license at the end and changed the color of the rocking chair. In reality it's a shade of light green, close to sea foam I believe. It's a pretty color but it didn't really work with the overall color scheme of the painting, so I made it brown.
​The best part of these two painting though are the frames. They aren't shown in these pictures, but they are beautiful. My dad hand made them out of original wide pine floor boards that we took up from our house in New Hampshire. I swear my dad can build anything! I will get a picture of them up at some point. They really are worth seeing.