Mid Winter, Not so Bad

January is the dreaded month around these parts. Short days, often bitterly cold temperatures, icy roads, big snow piles all over. Not so this year.

So far we have had no harsh cold spells and only a few inches of snow. This past week has had daytime highs well above freezing. The days are still short but getting longer.

Nothing much is happening these days but there is a nice display of ice sculptures in Town Square. I showed a few photos of the sculptures being carved in last week's post. Now they are complete and melting in the warm, (relatively speaking) temperatures.

When the sculptor was working on this last week, I thought he was making a bear. Now you can see that it is a Cheetah.

Many of these carvings have a Picasso vibe to them in my opinion.

You can almost hear all the frozen music in the air.

These sculptures were a lot of fun to look at. Many of them were quite large.

I got discouraged with the Sandhill Crane painting that I was working on so I set it aside for a while. Then I sketched out this 11x14" loon.

My intention is to make the darks of the loon barely stand out from the dark water. I want the loon's white spotting to jump out at the viewer. I will see whether it works out or not. I will probably need to put a dark glaze over the whole thing before I add the white spots.There is still much work to do on this painting.