Online learning for high school students has been… has been… well, it’s been something. I’m always within arms-length of the computer and so not venturing far from home. However, there is some flexibility that has allowed me to take advantage of the down-time and wonderful weather to step away from the computer just far enough to paint.

I have been working on the plein-air painting you see above. This is the street I live on and so much of the landscape and curve of the road has always appealed to me. So far I am four days into it, not including the preparatory sketch, and probably have one to two days left to finish it up.

Last week I got super busy making watercolor and mixed-media paintings of some coreopsis in a flower pot sitting on the deck of my home studio. It was great fun working on those paintings; something quite different than what my watercolors usually are. I didn’t have much of a plan to start with, just sketched something out and went right on building it up from there.

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As if all this hasn’t been enough, I had the great fortune to be commissioned by a friend to do two small watercolor paintings that would become Mother’s Day gifts for his mother and his wife. He was such a wonderful, easy to work with client!

All in all, remotely teaching high school students has been… well, something, but having the flexibility to spend more of the daytime part of the day to make art has been the silver lining that has helped make the whole situation mentally manageable.