We woke up this morning with huge snowflakes coming down, and it continued until just about an hour ago.  There is knee-deep fresh, fluffy snow carpeting everything, so it looks like a real winter wonderland out there.  I think this is the most snow we have received in one day in years.  So, of course, what could I do but paint!  Watercolors always seem to come into my hand when I get ready to start a new painting.  I woke up to an inspiration this morning to paint a 'Jaguar and Tigers'.  The 'tigers' are Tiger Lilies with the Jaguar peeking from behind.  I have a pretty good start on it already, but I ran out of steam for today.  After a very restless night and very little sleep, I thought I should not get too carried away and then ruin a painting.  There's always tomorrow.  I don't know if you all want to see progress painting, but if you do........well, just hit 'contact the artist' and let me know.  I would love to hear from you! 

There are a couple of things I learned about digital picture enhancing today.  This may be elementary to some people who already know these things, but with me, it's trial and error.  I took pictures of two different bowls of strawberries.  I didn't like one bowl, so I cut the bowl I liked out of one picture using the lasso and pasted on the picture of the backgroud I did like.  Then, I took my eraser and erased all the outside edges of the bowl, which brought out more of the original background through.  It turned out great!  Then, I used the enhance key and went into 'hue and saturation' and added a considerable amount of additional color into the picture.  I will now use this for the reference photo to start my painting.  Perhaps this simple trick will help you out also.