I have completed a set of watercolor paintings for a two-page spread in the book. It’s a book about the town of Gex, France, and will have a total of 82 paintings in it, including scenes of the town as well as the surrounding countryside.

I’ve completed 68 drawings for the book and have 14 left to do. Last week I chose a two-page spread at random and painted the scenes for it.

There are fields dotted round the outskirts of the town and many of them are filled with beautiful tall corn.

In amongst these fields are also many pastures where cows graze, and sometimes they’re provided with hay to chomp on, like this very young one.

There are many bright flowers growing alongside the country roads. One of these, the thistle, provides stunning color, like a tiny firework exploding in the grass.

There’s a story about these four cows and what they were looking at… but this will remain untold for now, so that there are fun things to look forward to when the book is finished and complete with text.

Outside some of the country homes, there are more cultivated flowers set close to the road, showing off their delicate finery.

Putting all these paintings together, below you can see what the two-page spread looks like with all the paintings set in place. (By clicking on any of the images in the post, you can see them in larger format.)

Stay tuned to DweezelJazz Art blog to see more paintings that will be in the upcoming book.

I mentioned in the last post, Summertime Activities, that as soon as I’ve finished the drawings, I’ll start painting scenes for a book.  In preparation, I’m doing a few scenes that I don’t intend to put in the book so that I can play with style, color and atmosphere.  Here’s one I did last weekend for just that purpose.  All of the photos in this post can be seen larger by clicking on them.

'Gex House Front' watercolor painting by Nat Wildish

There are many beautiful houses dotted all over the Pays de Gex in France.  One house front in the town of Gex caught my eye and inspired this watercolor painting.  The delicate touches, such as the fine ironwork on the front door, demonstrate a sweetness and finery without showy gaudiness, that I really love about France.

Monochromatic study in progress of 'Gex House Front' by Nat Wildish

I started ‘Gex House Front’ with a monochromatic study in sepia tones.  I really enjoyed doing this and liked the outcome.  My best friend and very talented artist, Shannon Ryan of ‘Shannon Ryan Art’, gave me the hint that sepia has black pigment in it and can darken a painting, and can even make the watercolors turn somewhat muddy when other colors are added on top of the sepia. I probably won’t use sepia all that often in the future, but I had great fun experimenting with it and will probably use it in small amounts here and there.

Here’s the monochromatic under painting, which is kind of neat all in itself – like one of those old tattered and faded photographs from long gone days of the past.  The house has probably also been there long enough to merit such a photo, and maybe there is one somewhere.

'Gex House Front' monochromatic watercolor painting by Nat Wildish

Wheat almost ready to harvest

It has been a long time since the last post here on DweezelJazz Art blog.  There have been a combination of things that made this so.  What started it was that we lost our Internet connection for six weeks.  Our Internet Service Provider, who will remain nameless here, upgraded their service, but unfortunately they lost our connection altogether and never found it again!  So we switched providers.  In France it takes a long time for a new provider to set up the line. But we’ve been back online for a few weeks now and everything is working very nicely.

Green Summer Countryside

We’ve had a very unusual summer here – it has rained so much that everything has stayed green and it looks like the high Alps in summertime.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  The air has been cleaned every few days by another downpour and lots of wind, but we’ve also had a lot of bright, shiny sunshine.  It has been idyllic.

Corn Field

We’ve watched and heard the sparrows nesting in the eaves of our house.  The swallows and house martins, also living around here, are cleaning up all of the mosquitoes in the area – we haven’t been bitten once at home!  The swallows are fantastic to watch as they swoop gracefully back and forth, nearly colliding with the walls when they get close to the house.  The roosters and chickens in the large open field next to us have been announcing themselves loudly and are a real joy to watch as they bound and run across the tall grass, always busy.

Jet D'Eau Geneva Switzerland

It has also been an eventful summer, as a result of something that happened way back in February.  I went to the dentist to have a fixed orthodontic retainer glued back on. (Visits to the dentist have taken me frequently into Geneva and so I’ve witnessed summer in town too, as you can see in the photos.)  This simple goal turned out to be far more involved than I at first thought.  The dentist took one look at me, asked me all about any symptoms I experienced and then he announced that he thought he might be able to largely remove those symptoms:  migraines, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, extreme fatigue, difficulty breathing, lung discomfort, neck and back muscle cramps, lack of sleep, and so on.

And, to my utmost amazement, in addition to the removal of these symptoms, I found that I no longer had reactions to being around perfumes, cleaning products and other toxic chemicals I have hitherto found increasingly difficult to endure.  I didn’t rush out to put these things in my environment, but it was fabulous not to feel like someone had laid out kryptonite around me every time I went out somewhere.

Place du Bourg de Four, Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

I’ve lived with these difficulties all my life and had come to accept them as part of life, at least my life.  So it has been with amazement that I’ve discovered that these myriad symptoms are indeed entirely due to jaw misalignment.  I’ve learned a tremendous amount about this in the last months;  it hasn’t been easy and has taken a huge amount of thinking and observing on my part, all the while trying to learn fast enough so as not to fall back into the abyss of pain-ridden exhaustion.  Life rarely offers a magic bullet.  My situation isn’t totally resolved and I’m still trying to find out if there’s a long-term solution to correct the jaw alignment.

Parc des Bastions, Geneva, Switzerland

The great thing is that along the way, there have been times during the last months that I’ve been the most pain-free I’ve ever been – in fact, I didn’t know what it was like to be that pain-free – didn’t know what it was like to have energy, and long, deep nights of sleep.  Fantastic!  So I took advantage of it!

Looking up at back of Old Town Geneva from opposite the Parc des Bastions

In June I finished the Total Training Online Course on Adobe Dreamweaver, and within a couple of weeks I designed a completely new look for DweezelJazz Art site, with new galleries and descriptive content for the paintings.

Then I worked on a number of drawings for paintings in egg tempera, inked them…

Inked drawings ready to glue onto the tempered glass.

and then glued them onto tempered glass.

Drawings ready to be underpainted, and then prepped for painting with egg tempera.

As I was doing this, and also preparing some drawings for painting in watercolor, Tony came up with a brilliant idea: what about creating a book of paintings?  Well, I have wanted to do something of that kind for a long time, dreaming about it.  I decided to bite the bullet.  I chose the subject, in fact, if I survive the first book, I plan to do a series of them: each book dedicated to a town and area in the Pays de Gex, France / Geneva, Switzerland area.

I started with a plan to fill a 60-page book, large format.  So I created a storyboard for the entire book, including image sizes and placement.

Storyboard for the first book.

Then I started drawing and drawing and drawing.

A drawing for the book.

I’m including scenes in towns and in the countryside around them, so that the book will give the feel of the place as a whole.

This is what I call a "cow bus".

Quite often at the beginning of summer, you can see tractors hauling a trailer full of cows out to the fields, and again in fall taking them back to the warmth of the barns.  It almost seems like the cows are being transported to school or something, so I call it a ‘cow bus’.

I’ve completed 64 drawings and have 18 left to do.  Then, all I have to do is paint them! I’ll paint them probably using a combination of ink and watercolor.  And of course add text to accompany the paintings.

Sunflower

So, if you’ve managed to read this entire post and have reached this far: thank you!  Thank you for reading this blog, and if you’ve been a reader for some time, thank you for continuing to read DweezelJazz Art blog.  I don’t post as often as I used to because I’ve had to prioritize the precious commodity of time, but I do plan to continue posting and have some photos of pretty places and countryside ready for future posts.  I’m very happy if you find it interesting and fun.  Life is full of beautiful things, to cherish and enjoy, and I try to share a little of that here.

This sunflower, for example,  just wouldn’t pose correctly for the photo – I reckon it was a bit drunk out there in the fresh air – couldn’t focus on having it’s photo taken!  But it is beautiful, nonetheless.