"Two Cups of Tea" -- oil on stretched canvas -- 11x14" -- Margie Guyot

"Yellow Primrose" -- oil on stretched canvas -- 11x14" -- Margie Guyot

Winter has returned with a vengeance! It snowed ALL day yesterday. A perfect day for painting in the studio. I'd found this vintage, striped table runner at a resale shop in Charlevoix last week. Loved the "cottagey" colors! I'm sure there will be more paintings with this cloth.

I love painting cups with tea. It's fascinating -- the colors change so quickly as the tea brews. These teacups are ancient, with "China" stamped on the bottom. Thin as paper. With little hand-painted bluebirds and flowers. It's a miracle they survived my move up north.

Because it was so dark & dreary outside, I had to set up a studio light to get some sense of sunlight and shadow patterns. Still, it's not quite as good as real sunshine.

The primrose plant came from Glen's in Charlevoix. I'm going to try to keep it alive until spring, so I can plant it in my flower garden.

I found I had to pre-mix all the colors of the striped fabric in fairly large quantities before doing the actual painting. I enjoy loading on the paint to get a "thick & juicy" look. Not only is the scene interesting, but I also like people to notice the beauty of the actual paint, its wonderful "mooshiness" and color.

"Poinsettias" -- oil on birch panel -- 8x10" -- Margie Guyot

Finally the poinsettias are coming into the stores! I'd been waiting for these hot little numbers. I've been doing lots of plein air landscapes and things were getting to be dark & gloomy! There's nothing like a good dash of red to liven things up.

This is just a tiny poinsettia I picked up for $3.33 at the grocery store. I set it on a red brocade fabric my brother brought over from China. It was quite a challenge to paint, as there was a lot of detail to it. Of course I could have painted in all the little details, but I wanted to keep this "loose and juicy". The two Christmas ornaments must be well over 50 years old. They were old when I was a kid and somehow they survived moving several times.

This little plant is surrounded by a gold foil sleeve and it was reflecting in quite an interesting way. It was kind of difficult to photograph this. It's extremely wet and gooey and the light today was very dim. We're having a big ice storm at the moment here in NW Michigan. So the bulb on the far right was glaring. Really, it's darker.

Oh -- now I see the ice storm has changed over to snow. Yee-haw!