"The more you trust and rely upon the Spirit,
the greater your capacity to create."
~Dieter F. Uchtdorf
This morning, I got up early and headed into the mountains to see the fall color. I love this time of year and many of the leaves will be off the trees in another week so this was my best chance to see them. I drove from Colorado Springs up the back way to Victor and then around to Cripple Creek and back down... for those not familiar with this area, it is near Pikes Peak on the southeastern range of the Rocky Mountains. It was really so beautiful and some of the most breathtaking sites were not in a place where I could pull off the road to take a picture. Regardless, photos don't do justice to the real thing. I have an album on my Flickr with the photos I took today... you can see them all (both the good and the bad shots!) here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elysian68/sets/72157600648611493/
This huge thistle plant has been growing next to our office and, even though it's a noxious weed, I thought it was so pretty and I had to take a photo... two days later, the property maintenance tore the plant out. I managed to catch a busy bee harvesting the sweet pollen:
On Friday, we got a very cold storm, bringing some wild thunder and lightning and tons of rain. Last month was the driest July on record so we really needed the moisture. It has been constantly rainy and cloudy since this storm rolled in, but this morning it cleared enough to get a glimpse of the Peak. This is the first snow of the season and means that Autumn is right around the corner - my favorite time of year!
I altered six of these postcards to represent what I love about the place that I live - SNOW! It's hard to tell from the photo, but I used fun flock over the tree, shrubs, and slope to give it a fuzzy, snowy effect. These are for a Paper Traders swap.
This is the spread I created for Stefanie's "Darkness" journal in the Paper Traders Round Robin. The buffalo is another one of my hand-drawn animals cut from textured paper and colored with markers and chalk. I guess I'm getting over my fear of drawing just a teensy bit. I made the fireflies by drawing their abdomens with my gold leafing pen so that they shine when the light hits them. The sunset was taken from a preprinted piece of scrapbook paper but I hit it with a
Moon Glow Starburst Stain (Alpine Ice Rose) which has a gold shimmer in a pink watercolor base.
I recreated the scene from a photo of Pikes Peak as seen looking through Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs where I live. Just trying to draw a little inspiration from my everyday world =)
I am a snow lover! It is the very best thing about moving back to Colorado. Unfortunately, this winter has been very cold and too dry. Did you know that it has to be somewhat warm for it to actually snow? Well, yesterday, we got a nice wet dose of the white stuff. This is the view that I woke up to this morning (photo of Pikes Peak taken from my deck =)
