Wednesday, February 25, 2026 The Workshop: Dutch Doings and the Great Idea

Ye olde paintbrush has not seen a lot of action since my surgery, but I did dust it off a couple times to work on something for a dear friend of Dutch heritage.

As usual, I went on Pinterest and scrounged around for ideas, building up a little file of possibilities. The main thing for me is that it has be something I might be able to replicate, which eliminates many choices.

I found a simple blue tile with a clog in the middle. How hard can it be?

Sigh. Harder than I thought. Here’s the original if you want to know why I was unhappy with it:

Slighted daunted, I went back to the file and picked out a simple windmill to do instead, to which I added a Bible verse that this friend had sent to me recently.

That’s all that’s been happening in my watercolor workshop of late, although I have another unfinished painting in the works.

A couple days ago I had a Great Idea! My life is littered with the carcasses of Great Ideas, so I’m not sure how far this will go, but here it is: I decided to embark upon a study of imitating paintings of the masters from over the centuries! I don’t expect mine to be any good, but it seemed like it might be good practice for drawing and painting.

Here’s the funny part. No sooner did I have the idea when I dreamed about it that very night. In my dream, I decided to start with a painting of a rabbit by Albrecht Durer.

First of all, kudos to my brain for dredging that up out of my subconscious. Second of all, even in my dream I started wondering if I had bitten off more than I could chew. I made an attempt, but don’t remember much about what it looked like. Somehow (again, kudos to my brain) I remembered that he had a unique way of doing his signature using just his initials, so I spent some time in the dream trying to figure out how I could imitate that with my own initials. Ha ha! Sometimes I crack myself up with the dreams I have.

So stay tuned! Maybe I’ll start with AD’s rabbit since it was foretold in a dream.

I’ll probably dream about deleting this in the morning.