ART BREAK TIME: WHAT LIES BENEATH

Day Three in San Antonio was a doozie -- too much to show in one post -- and involves some of my favorite 'splorin discoveries. But before we get to that, we need a little art break. At least, I know I do. To show you the seriousness of my obsession, I must confess that before I had unpacked any of the goodies we brought home with us, or even checked all the emails and facebook news I had missed, my hubby found me up to my elbows in decoupage and paint. It was that magnet again!

 So here are the bits of "sand and sea" I showed you, glued on to form my textured background.

And here they are with the tissue paper sketches I did, collaged over them.

Now I'm counting the days until we get to do some beach walking in Port Aransas!
 

RIVER CITY: DAY II

The first thing I always do when traveling with my hubby is find "my place." Since he likes to sleep at least a couple of hours longer than I do, and since there's not a whole lot you can do in a hotel room without turning on some lights, I have to find a place to hang out until he wakes up. This time it ended up being Big Apple Bagels, just a block down from the hotel. Not only did they have great bagels...

they even had a Little Free Library out front! I LOVE Little Free Libraries!

Once hubby was up and at 'em, we headed over to La Villita, San Antonio's first "neighborhood." Originally it was a settlement of primitive huts on the banks of the river, housing for Spanish soldiers. Later, immigrants from France and Germany settled there. Remember how I said downtown San Antonio has two levels, one on top of the other? Well, this is the kind of thing you see at just about every intersection, if you walk over to the edge of the bridge/street and look down.

These days La Villita is full of great little shops, galleries, and eateries. I made a beeline for one gallery in particular -- one called Artistic Endeavors, which is the only place around that carries the work of my favorite artist, W.B. Thompson. Guess what I got while I was there, thanks to my handy-dandy prize gift card? Here's a hint!

Unfortunately, W.B. moved away from San Antonio a while back, and settled in the Virgin Islands. He has moved on to other things, and no longer paints these color-mad San Antonio scenes that I love so madly. The gallery only had five or six of his pieces left -- two giant originals the size of doors (and uber expensive!), two tiny originals that were in muted pastels and featured the modern skyscrapers I hate, and this medium-sized color-mad print of the San Antonio I love. I went with the print.

From La Villita it was an easy walk over to Rosario's on S. Alamo for lunch.

They even had puffy tacos!

From there the plan was to head over to the Mexican Institute of Cultures, on the Hemisfair grounds. Sadly, though the hours listed on the door said they should be open, they were not. On the up-side, we just happened to stumble upon this grotto. I LOVE grottoes!

By then we were pretty pooped, so we took a river taxi back to the hotel for our afternoon siesta.

Dinner that evening was at the new Bob's Chop House, up near La Cantera, with one of my hubby's oldest friends and his wife. John and Dr. Bob met in middle school I think, ran track together in high school, roomed together at UT, and then Bob was best man at our wedding. Alas, as so often happens, I just got to having way too much fun, and forgot to take a single picture!

SAN ANTONIO: DAY ONE

Our Balcony at Hotel Valencia, Overlooking Houston Street and Facing the Old Texas Theatre

So, you'll never guess where we went first, after checking into our hotel in San Antonio. Why, to an art supply store, of course! I checked ahead of time and found one called Herweck's, which was in walking distance to our hotel.

 
Fortunately for me, it turned out to be a great one! I was able to get the last couple of things on my Art Camp shopping list -- Golden acrylic glazing liquid and Stabilo mark-all pencils -- and several more of the Sharpie water-based paint pens that an artist friend recently gave me, and which I fell madly in love with. As an added bonus, all the Golden products were 25-35% off as part of their back-to-school sale, AND I got to pay for everything with my super-dooper gift card that was part of my Visit San Antonio prize package! Now, I'm wondering, why the heck didn't I buy a whole lot more? (Head Slap!)

Afterwards we spent the afternoon exploring the downtown area at street level. If you've never been there, you might not know that there are two downtown San Antonios, stacked one on top of the other, and they are worlds apart! One is what you can see from the sidewalks at street level, and the other is the lush, shady world that greets you when you descend the steps down to the riverwalk level. We'll get to that later. Meanwhile, we were checking out shops like the Buckhorn Saloon, and enjoying some of the interesting local characters that were hanging about.

Now it may be autumn where you are, but this week, in San Antonio, it was still hotter 'n Hades, and we had managed to work up a powerful thirst! So we headed over to Schilo's deli, where you can still get homemade root beer in a frosty mug...

and make a phone call from a telephone booth!

After a short siesta, we cleaned up and headed downstairs for our lovely three-course dinner at the Citrus restaurant, there in our hotel, which was also part of our prize package. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a single picture! Almost everyone there, it seems, was on their way to the fabulous Majestic Theatre afterwards, which is right next to the Valencia. You'll never guess what is showing there right now. Book of Mormon! If only we'd known, instead of buying those tickets to take all the kids to see it in Austin next week, we could have booked two rooms for two nights at the hotel, instead of one room for four nights, and brought the kids with us to see it there in San Antonio!

Pictures from when we were there a couple of years ago.

Ah well, it's going to be a hoot 'n a holler wherever we see it, 'cause we'll get to experience it all over again, through their first-timers' eyes!

IT JUST SOUNDS NASTY

If any of you are fans of Ray Wylie Hubbard, then you have surely heard his song Snake Farm. Well, every time we drive over to San Antonio, we have to pass this place. 

And, since Ray Wylie just happens to live here in Wimberley, I'm guessing this is the place that inspired that song. We've passed it a million times, but this time I finally made John stop and pull in.

Did I go inside?

Not on your life!

AND WE'RE OFF, LIKE A HERD OF TURTLES

Oh my, my! Is there anything more glorious than an early autumn Hill Country morn? The temps have dropped into the fifties the last several nights, and I was able to throw all the windows open for a few hours when I got up. Plus, the grasses that cover our property have sent up plumes, and are beginning to waft and ripple with the breeze. I even saw smoke coming up from a neighbors property one morning, so I'm guessing they finally lifted our perpetual burn ban, at least for a while. If only these temps would last through the week.

This book of W.B. Thompson's paintings is all I could afford last time we went!

Believe it or not, John and I are finally going to take that trip to San Antonio that I won from the Visit San Antonio Facebook page almost a year ago! We kinda got side-tracked by all our trips to the E.R. this year! Anyhoo, we've both been to San Antonio numerous times, having grown up here in Texas, but I don't think we've ever once been there when it wasn't blazin' hot and humid! We were really sorta hoping that this trip, being in late September, might be the exception. However, last time I checked, it looked liked the temps were going to pop back up into the 90s just in time for our arrival. Ah well, c'est la vie!

Never fear. I'm sure we will manage to have a marvelous time nonetheless. How could we not? Not only did our prize package include four free nights at the lovely Valencia Hotel, right on the Riverwalk, free passes to Fiesta Texas, the Witte museum, the McNay, and the San Antonio Botanical Gardens, a trolley tour, and lovely meals at two restaurants, but it also included a very generous gift card to cover travel expenses. And, since we have virtually no travel expenses, living only about 90 minutes away, we can use it however we wish. I'm thinking a trip to the little gallery in La Villita that carries the art of one of my very favorite artists (pictured above), stops at a couple of local art stores I've managed to scope out, and maybe shopping for a few colorful garments a la Frida Kahlo, might all be good places to start. What do you think?

 

MY SUPER SPLURGE

Ever since my sister and I took that Dyan Revealey class together at a shop called Stamp Asylum in Plano, I've been receiving the shop's newsletters via email. I'm pretty well stocked for supplies now, so I don't pay much attention to them, but a recent image of a new paper crafting tablet from Graphic 45 kinda reached out to grab me, despite the fact that I rarely do any paper crafting. I'm more into paint!


Two things on that tiny image jumped out at me:

La Belle Epoque art...

and chalkboard art. Well, make that three things. There were also some words in French!

Now, if there are three things I love, it's La Belle Epoque, chalkboard art, and anything French!  I hopped in my car and ran over to Austin. I searched high and low at both Hobby Lobby and JoAnn's, but couldn't find anything at all from Graphic 45 at either one. It seems they both carry their own lines of rather generic crafting papers. Fortunately, my sweet sister offered to go pick one up for me at the store there in Plano and pop it in the mail. I nearly had a stroke when she told me how much it cost (like I said, I never buy craft paper tablets), especially since I had no idea what I was getting inside that tablet! Would it be worth the money? I'll let you be the judge...

There are all kinds of beautiful papers such as the two above, but what I love most are the pages filled with stuff like this -- just perfect for cutting out and and gluing onto one of my painted backgrounds as a focal point, or in place of hand-written words.

 

 Is there a happy dance going on in the Wee Little Studio today? You bet your sweet bippy!

  

SAND AND WATER

 It was right around this time last year that we heard about a great little beach bar/lodge in Port Aransas. We waited until all the kiddos were back in school, so the beach would be semi-deserted, then headed down there to check it out for ourselves.

Definitely Our Kind Of Place!

We're hoping to go back there again with our BFFs Paula and Tim, to celebrate my big SIX-OH in late October, but it just depends on how well Miss Paula is doing by then, after her recent car accident. Fingers crossed!

Anyhoo, thinking about all that sand and water got me to thinkin' I'd better do one more "transparent foreground" project before moving on to something else -- perhaps the Dion Dior "Sparkle Arkle" project that I never got around to in my 21 Secrets class? Can't let all those Twinks and Silks go to waste! So, yesterday, I began pulling together all my little scraps and gee-gaws for the textured background.

There are the sandy bits...

and the watery bits...

and a great little Take-Along Guide picked up on that last trip to Port A., which should provide plenty of inspiration for the tissue sketches that will make up my transparent foreground. I just knew that little book would come in handy some day! In fact, I'm really wishing I had some of the others from that collection, like Snakes, Salamanders and Lizards, or Tracks, Scats and Signs. Perhaps I'll put those on my Christmas wish list.

Now all I have to do is decide whether to start gluing these bits into one of my own journals, or into a certain someone's Circle Journal, which has been sitting on my art table for about a week now!