Winter at Velddrift

One of the aspects of painting that I still hesitate doing, is plein air painting. I need photo references. Sad, but true. Maybe one day I'll take all my oil painting paraphernalia and set up somewhere in the surrounding countryside. Until then, it's photo references!

This was taken by a friend who paints with our group every Friday. He is lucky enough to have a holiday house up the West Coast in a fishing area called Velddrift. His is one of 3 houses in the area and this is the view from his front 'garden'.

Winter in the Cape, and especially up the West Coast, has it's own bleek kind of beauty. A Winter rainfall area, everything seems wet and damp, but the water brings out the most glorious colours when the sun shines.

But wait! About 3 weeks ago, I did try a plein air piece. This was done from a friend's house in Tableview. She has the most magnificent view of the vlei, which is home to an incredible amount of birdlife, leading through to this panorama of Table Mountain. The day we were there, the clouds danced in and out and around the mountain, first hiding then revealing this beautiful mountain we live with every wonderful day. I don't think I've done it justice, but there it is, my plein air piece!

Packing, Packing, and More Packing

Today Harry and I focused on packing up more stuff. Even though we haven't closed on our house we do want to be all packed up and ready to go when we do. So today we drove around looking for plastic totes for my toy collection. I normally use those 50 gallon tubs but we went to three Targets and one Home Depot and no had those large totes. Guess I'll need to buy smaller ones.. just more of them.

So we got home with no totes so we decided to pack up what we could from the kitchen. We also tried to purge the crap that we either don't use or is too old and crappy looking. So we spent a few hours packing up stuff.

We still have quit a bit of stuff to pack but we still have until the end of September to be out of our current house... so that should be plenty of time.