Pouring My Art Out

Even more Maui flowers… because: flowers!

Posted on May 16, 2014 by pouringmyartout

More pictures of flowers from our second honeymoon in Maui… That one looks like two flowers in one… little yellow flowers growing in a big pink flower.

I took that one at a winery we visited.

That one was also at the winery… wait… let me zoom in a little…

Oh yeah… that’s better.

There is no end to the color combinations that nature plays around with.

And maybe it is just the artist in me, but I do like a nice color combination.

I mean, if you were going to mix colors, would you go with a creamy yellowish-white that fades to a more buttery-yellow combined with a very subtle bluish purple? Maybe you would. I know I might have. But we weren’t the first.

Posted in flowers, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged art, color combination, current-events, flowers, hawaii, humor, little yellow flowers, maui, nature, outdoors, travel | 6 Comments

More Maui wowie flowers… say that five times fast…

Posted on May 15, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I decided that I can’t let you go until tomorrow with that last post about farting in the shower as the last thing you saw on this blog…

So here are more random pictures of flowers… Hey, did you notice that that last one was just growing by a parking lot? Some of these are from the jungle, some from the hotels we stayed at, and some just growing in gardens or by the side of the road or wherever.

That is how lusciously flowerlicious Maui is…

Every color of the rainbow… or combination of colors…

Growing in riotous swaths and glorious dreamscapes…

A profusion of passion, a veritable assault on all your senses…

Nature putting our imaginations to shame.

Even the leaves had more colors than most plants on the mainland.

Posted in flowers, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged art, flowers, hawaii, humor, maui, nature, outdoors, photography, travel | 20 Comments

Ahhh… this is what a vacation in Maui should look like… two happy feet snuggling in warm sand…

Posted on May 14, 2014 by pouringmyartout

Wrong! My size 15 feet are two big, fat liars! That is not what a vacation should look like at all. This is what a vacation should look like, from the perspective of your feet…

You see those two raw, bloody spots on top of my feet? I earned those. I earned them by wearing rented swim fins and swimming with sea turtles and octopi and reef fish. I did so much snorkeling that by the end of our trip, the top of my feet looked like raw sushi. Or is that a redundancy? It got so bad, I had to swim without fins the last day… but since size 15 feet are like fins anyway, no big deal. I could take a picture of my feet right now and show you that I still have scabs.

When your feet are not covered with swim fins, they should be wearing hiking boots, or tennis shoes… or a pair of these all-terrain adventure shoes…

Yes, I know they make me look like a dorky tourist. But I could climb over lava rocks or sharp coral, I could wade in jungle streams or tide pools. I could walk on sandy beaches or muddy trails. I could do it all in the same day without taking them off. And I did.

Your feet should get up early and go to bed late. They should take you on adventures and explore wherever you are in the world… Your feet should be leaving footprints on a beach before the sun even comes up… before anybody else is awake… because there is nothing more awesome than a lone set of footprints on a tide-washed shore…

Especially when you can still see your favorite bar in the distance.

Yes, our fancy beach resort had these nice chairs for sitting in and watching the sunset…

You know how long I spent sitting in one of those chairs? About five minutes. Just long enough to take the two pictures of my feet in the sand…

Take good care of your feet. They are your ticket to adventure.

Posted in My travels, Stories of my life, sunsets | Tagged adventure, feet, hawaii, humor, maui, nature, outdoors, shoes, swim fins, travel, vacation | 61 Comments

Free adventure tours of Maui!!!

Posted on May 13, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I will be your personal tour guide and show you all the best sights and exciting things to do on Maui, and you will not have to pay me at all…

All you need to do is provide me with airfare and food… and make sure your hotel room has a pullout bed…

Posted in Pictures of me | Tagged adventure, free tours, hawaii, humor, maui, me, outdoors, personal tour guide, travel | 32 Comments

Maui is crawling with lizards…

Posted on May 12, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I met a lot of lizards on our trip to Maui. I like lizards. There is just something cool about them…

Do you see the lizard in this picture? Let me zoom in a little closer…

That is a handsome chameleon. I don’t know if they are native to the island, or escaped from a pet store. There are a lot of animals on Maui that were brought there by us, and a lot of those animals are creating havoc with the natural animal population. We watched this guy from our hotel balcony while we ate lunch… well, it wasn’t really a hotel, but I will get into that later…

That is a nice color for a lizard… but because he was on the trunk of the tree and not on a green leaf, he decided that it wasn’t the best color… so he changed it…

Not exactly the color of the wood, but I guess it made him happy.

That is a gecko. They are just adorable. I took all these pictures at the second hotel… sort of… that we stayed at. I never saw lizards in the jungle. They are too good at hiding. But the lizards like the hotels… the lights attract bugs for them to eat…

Most of the rest of these pictures I took out in the little smoking area.

Some of the pictures are more in focus than others… I wish I could remember if the clear ones are from my camera or cell phone. Or it might just be that I kept trying to get the phone close to the lizards but not close enough to scare them away.

The lizards really seemed to like this one big leaf right by where I sat to smoke…

There was always at least one lizard on that leaf…

I got so I could recognize some of them…

Some of them had frills on their backs. Some of them had camouflage patterns. Some were just plain black or green or brown. But they all do those lizard push ups. That cracks me up…

I named that one ‘Stumpy’… he was missing the tip of his tail. I am sure there is an interesting story behind that. The lizards were all very active, and spent a lot of time opening their mouths at each other, and doing their push ups, and opening up their neck flaps and chasing each other around. I don’t know if it was mating season or not, but they all seemed more interested in each other than in the insects.

There are two lizards having a stare-down. I don’t know if they were getting ready to fight… or something else…

But either way, I decided to give them some privacy.

Posted in dogs and other animals, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged animals, hawaii, humor, lizards, maui, nature, photography, The lizards, travel, writing | 103 Comments

Oh, I met some animals on Maui…

Posted on May 12, 2014 by pouringmyartout

On the way back from having one last smoke one evening, I met this charming little creature… saying his bedtime prayers…

That thing is like 5 inches long… and really thin…

I got my cell phone pretty close to take those pictures. The really weird thing is, he… or she… was still there the next morning…

I also met this guy… or gal…

It was up under the eaves of a ranch where we went for a sunset trail ride on horses on our last night in Maui. I didn’t put my cell phone too close to the spider… that thing was freekin’ huge… and I am glad I was careful… I found out that they bite.

Posted in dogs and other animals, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged bugs, hawaii, humor, insects, maui, nature, outdoors, photography, praying mantis, spiders, travel | 27 Comments

Name that car… an exciting new game…

Posted on May 8, 2014 by pouringmyartout

So the first thing we did after leaving the airport on Maui was to go to the car rental place. Being the oh-so-practical person that my wife is, she had set us up with a sensible car… with trunk space and good gas mileage. But there was a sign on the wall saying they were having a special deal on upgrades… and I looked out in the lot and saw all these Mustangs… and they were convertibles. So I gave her that look… you know the one, ladies… when your husband or boyfriend wants… something.

And we ended up with this…

Oh yeah… I know it isn’t really cool… but I felt cool in it… because I was a teenager in the 70’s when these cars first came out in this color. No, they do not sound like 70’s muscle cars. But it was a blast to drive or just sit in while my wife drove. And guess what… the thing is… yay, the thing… most of the cars we saw on the island were rentals. And most of those were Mustangs.

So if you are going to pick a showy car, why pick one in a boring color, right?

The other thing is… what, two things in one post?… that as soon as I got close to the car, I knew I had to name it. When we sent an email to our oldest daughter, Jessica, she knew she had to name it. It turned into a game.

And now you can play too.

Here is what we came up with:

The Incredible Hulk

The Green Hornet

Dragonfly

Grasshopper

The Green Flash

So, why don’t we see if you can come up with a better one?

Posted in My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life | Tagged car rental, hawaii, humor, maui, muscle cars, mustang, photography, travel | 58 Comments

I got your multimedia… part 2…

Posted on April 20, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I have done a little more work on that unfinished watercolor sketch. Only I am doing it in Photoshop. Because how cool is it that you can paint light playing on water, and then use a computer, which uses light to make little dots, and then add those into a painting?

Here is where I stopped last time…

And here is what I did since then…

I added a little color to the boats. Then I started playing with their reflections in the water. Oh, and I have started to add some more shading to the strange rock formation that looms over Morrow Bay.

Posted in My art | Tagged art, humor, nature, painting, travel, watercolor painting, watercolors | 54 Comments

I got your multimedia… part 1…

Posted on April 19, 2014 by pouringmyartout

(or): Where the ship hits the fan… Okay, that joke only works if you are a fan of my art…

So I told you that I had a silly idea… no… that’s fine, I can wait till you stop laughing… I have been sharing some of my unfinished watercolor paintings with you. Here is one I haven’t shown you yet…

It is a pictures I started on a family vacation years ago when we all went to Morrow Bay on the central California coast. This was when I first started trying to interest my mother in watercolor painting. I made a mistake. I said we should try painting the view of the bay from the deck of her hotel room.

Painting a landscape is hard. I consider myself to be fairly good at drawing, but this view contained so many elements… land, sky, boats, water, clouds and fog, trees and bushes. I did a very rough pencil sketch, just to get the feel. I wasn’t trying to be photorealistic. I just wanted her to start playing with the watercolors. I did a sketch for each of us. My mistake was that I should have started her out with something easy, like the geometric patterns I posted earlier this week.

The picture above is mine. I am not particularly proud of it. I keep adding paint, but as I mentioned in one of the posts bellow, watercolors do not allow you to paint over mistakes like thicker paints do.

But here is the idea I had. What if I clean it up and work on it in Photoshop, like I did with the pictures I did for my children’s book… (available for sale, over there in my sidebar, by the way… just follow the links… kids love that book)…

So I am going to do some posts where I show you, step-by-step, how I am trying to turn a mediocre painting into something better…

There. I haven’t done much, yet. Just worked on some outlines on the boats. But give me time, and we will see what we can do.

Posted in My art, Stories of my life | Tagged art, boats, humor, painting, travel, watercolor painting, watercolor paintings, watercolors | 14 Comments

Just a few more pictures of a few more paintings…

Posted on April 19, 2014 by pouringmyartout

Here are my last photos of the watercolors I was working on while visiting my mom in the Bay Area… and the last of my tips for easy ways to have fun with watercolor paints…

Flowers are always a good way to practice painting. You don’t need to draw fancy flowers. Just paint some stems and put some leaves on them, and then paint some random flower shapes at the top. You can use any colors you want, any shapes you want. They do not have to look like real flowers.

Just play, have fun, go crazy. Let the colors grow like a wild dream garden. Every painting might not end up as something you will hang on your wall. But you will learn from every painting you do.