Paint Party Friday and last week of Summer of Color !

Sage and sepia .....
When I read what the colours for the last week of Summer of Color were, my first thought was "UGH".
These are sooo not my colours. Sage is in my opinion a bit of a drab green, and sepia, well, ..... even more drab. And, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a shit-colour, excuse the language ..... Good for photos, but for painting, no. I only ever use it for shadows, and even then very sparsely. Lately I prefer blues and purples for my shadows.

Anyway, at the same time I was a bit excited, because I really wondered how it would look together. I had a hard time mixing the colours, most colours I have are very bright, try making some drab colours with that.... So I'm not sure I got the colours completely right, but this is the best I could do with what I had:

I like the combination of the colours, they work well together. And I got a nice surprise mixing one of my darker greens with white. I got a really nice blue-ish green that I'll probably use again in the future. Something I'd never have known if it wasn't for this challenge. Aaaah, the things one can learn from challenges ... ☺

I'm also still painting stones. Here are some in progress pieces:

And the rock my daughter finished for her dad:

And with this the Summer of Color has come to an end. Next week I'll post a mosaic of all the pieces that I made. How fast 6 weeks can go by. When I just started the challenge I had just returned from Belgium and was feeling very fragile. I'm feeling a lot stronger now, but every now and then reality hits me again full-force, and leaves me sad and empty and shaken. It's often the small little things, like coming across the last email she wrote, or remembering something I wanted to tell her, or having to remove her name from my list of newsletter-subscribers. It makes it all so final. It's weird, with sisters and brothers, you just expect them to always be there. And when suddenly one of them gets ripped away life loses its security. It forces you to acknowledge that life is short and fragile, that you don't know what's coming next, that it can be over in a second. It's not a nice feeling, and it makes me worry all the time that anything will happen to anybody else. It'll take time to get over that sense of fragility.

Marianne wrote on her blog yesterday about a song of the Bee Gees that inspired her to make another beautiful card, and she said the song made her think of me. I'm so happy she introduced me to this song, I'd never heard it. Here are some of the lyrics, so beautiful:

Go on with your song, bird - you can't go wrong bird

You will go on and on bird, like you did before

though your wings are broken, the sky is so wide open

And the wind is waiting for you like an open door.

Next week my other sister will be here again with her family, after travelling up north. They'll stay here another 5 days before flying back. Looking forward to that!

And in the meantime I have my art. And it's such a relief to lose myself in it, and to be able to pour out all my feelings of grief and helplessness onto the canvas or the page, to find comfort in a good quote or poetry. I started a new painting when SOC started, and every week I put the leftover colours from my palette on there. This is where it is now. And no: you won't find any sepia or sage on there. Only a bit of the surprise blue-ish green ... ☺

Looking forward to finishing this .....

Well, thanks so much for being here, and for the advice with Google+. Seems I'm not the only one who doesn't understand it ;-) I'm still not sure what to do. I'll let you know when/if I try it.

Linking this as always to Paint Party Friday and to Summer of Color. Hope you are having a fantastic day, and a weekend full of warmth and joy.  ♥ ♥ ♥