Category: Karen Hilliard Art Blog

Holiday Crafts and More

What is your favorite craft to make during the holiday season? Do you do this for your own home, loved ones, or as gifts for others? In the midst of completing commissions before Christmas, I am also trying to get some craft projects finished. Some, I have yet to start. Personally, I love knitting, baking, cooking, and of course…painting. Recently, I have tried to dabble with a crochet hook and teach myself to learn this task. I also have started sewing a few projects for our daughter. Yes, sewing!! I absolutely love making my own things and looking at items in a store and thinking, I want to try to attempt that. The gifts I purchase are ones that speak to me, I know how much time it would take me to make it, or I think…wow…I cannot make that. Those special handmade gifts that really stand out and are altogether super impressive to myself. So, this time of year holds many happy memories for me. Gift giving would have to be my favorite and I love doing this year round. Holidays just make it a bit more special when decorations are added to the mix. Not to mention all the amazing food and drinks we all get to consume.

Do you have any favorite recipes you would like to share in the comments? Or, any favorite food/drinks you personally love? My family really enjoys Gingerbread items during December and Pumpkin treats October through December. Our pumpkins lasted until March last year so we enjoyed them for a longer amount of time, and this year we plan on freezing the purees so we can eat the squash year round. Pumpkin has so many healing properties and when combined with the spices just tastes delectable. If any of you would like some recipes please contact me! While cooking up a storm, we are also crafting daily. Yesterday we turned some toilet paper rolls into Nutcrackers just for fun and whimsy. The music has been playing throughout the house lately and leaving us in a very spirited mood. Also, ornaments have started. Commissions as well as fun child oriented ornaments involving googly eyes, gemstones, and such. What a fun time of year this is! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and hopefully time to catch up on something special you are trying to finish. Thank you for reading.

-Karen Hilliard

Another Beautiful Day

Another beautiful backpacking experience through the desert near our home. We found multiple rocks and stones with different types of history intertwined within. Each one had various sediments and the stones were smoothed by wind and rain. Feeling the texture of the Earth beneath and through our fingertips was wonderful. Making shapes with our bodies with our shadows was entertaining. The shapes were followed by movement and flow with the wind. We got to watch a raven in flight and being held still in wind gusts. The fire preventative vehicles of Lake Mead drove the trail as well creating massive dust. They all waved at the baby and the dog sat while watching them pass. The gravel was deep like sand hills on a beach, for those of you that love the ocean or lakes, you know what I am talking about. It was a complete leg workout for sure. Having the dog on leash while carrying a toddler was an interesting experience.

We were fortunate to have a warming sun overhead and a cool breeze below. It was definitely hat and bundle up weather. Our favorite time to be outside for sure. The desert holds many marvelous transformations throughout the months. We went from massive heat waves to a drop in temperature quite quickly and are enjoying every minute of it. I recently made a reel, a post, with a video of the two little loves roaming about outside. I mentioned how all of us find a deep passion for the outdoors in our own ways. As an artist, I get motivated and find extreme inspiration for all my creative ventures. Motivation also pushes my ideas for knitting, crocheting, sewing, cooking, etc. Many talents to be explored for sure. I come home with so many ideas and hopefully carve out the time to complete a few. I wish you all a Wonderful Wednesday and hope you can get outside this week! Thank you for reading.

-Karen Hilliard

Tags New Blog

Backpacking

Stomach flu running through the whole family can take an entire two weeks out of a month. Our schedule has for sure been thrown off and blogs, painting, etc. were not even in the cards during this time. Now, with a clean bill of health all around, we are all back and ready to take on the day. After resting for what felt like a very long while, the baby and I decided to go for a backpacking trip. We had a quick out-and-back due to weakness and needing to build back up muscle strength in the Mama. She had been asking to go backpacking for several days and I did not want to disappoint. Lake Mead Recreation Area is a great place for quick out-and-backs. The trailheads are right off the road for most of the mild hikes. We found a lovely spot and went out just the two of us. Here is a little sketch from our book about what we did while out there.

A beautiful bird with blue on its tail feathers joined us for a short amount of time. It watched us from a perch in a hueco on the rock formation and then proceeded to fly low around us. The bird had a wonderful call or chirp. I love their specific communication calls and wish I could identify this little wonder. We collected rock sediments, dirt, and watched how they flowed through our fingers into the wind. A lovely textile experience and quite enjoyable for both of us. There was also much fascination with our shadows and creatures we created along the walk. The baby did a wonderful job walking some of the way and loved being in the backpack for the rest of the journey. I hope you have all been well and I look forward to writing this blog again now that we are feeling better. I wish you all a Terrific Thursday and thank you for reading!

-Karen Hilliard

Tags New Blog

“Juliet’s Fall”

Here they are! The new Tiny Painting Series, “Juliet’s Fall.” I wrote about these little color wonders in my previous blogs “Fall Season,” and in “Chestnuts” I gave a glimpse of one of the other paintings with Fall foliage. The colors of this series brought such joy to my studio and warmth to my home. I wrote in my Newsletter about how I envisioned knitting sweaters, hand warmers, and scarves while possibly sipping tea or coffee. Going from the “Pumpkins 2024 Series” to “Juliet’s Fall” was a wonderful transition from October to November for me. These new paintings focusing mainly on leaves and season changes reminded me of our last days at the Pumpkin Patch at Gilcrease Orchard. Watching the vines and leaves descend due to people choosing their pumpkins and also because of heat exhaustion, was an interesting change to experience from the year before. The pumpkin Patch was much cooler last year than this one and we could really see the difference in pumpkins this year from the year prior. They have been ripening sooner than expected and many meals have been made already! The Pumpkin paintings have filled my home with new colors thank the year before and inspired those deep orange hues for the new Fall pieces as well.

I released the paintings in my Newsletter as well along with the New larger painting I have been working on, still a work in progress. You can find out more about that painting by signing up for my Newsletter…just an email from me to you every month with new artwork, and a friendly hello! In this blog, I am diving a bit deeper into the inspiration for these smaller works. Juliet, the photographer, is a wonderful person who fills the world with color and light. She is also an amazing mother with fantastic children who bring light to this world as well. Juliet is honest, hard working, brilliant, and has a warm glow about her. She can talk with anyone and treats everyone with respect. I wanted to honor her personality in these Tiny Paintings. It was a challenge to create smaller bits and pieces of this beautiful lady’s persona and hopefully you can feel her light shining through to all of you. I will be adding more paintings to this series, and they will all look different than the ones posted. Wishing you all a Fabulous Friday and thank you for reading!

-Karen Hilliard

Tags New Blog, watercolor painting

Trials and Tribulations

I have been through many trials and tribulations throughout my life and I am a huge fan of the trials. Focusing on the trying aspect of many ventures has helped me through any type of discomfort. If I am writing about art, since this is an art post, I would focus on the many attempts for each painting, drawing, sketch, etc. There is such a joy in the build up of what an art project will eventually turn into. Most of the time, I love to just start with a dot or a line and see where it will take me. There are many mess ups, mistakes, or as Bob Ross put it, “Happy Little Accidents.” Life boils down to how we look at things and what perspective we are seeing each moment with. The movie, “The Choice,” adapted from the book by Nicholas Sparks, explains this in a lovely way. Life comes down to choices. The mom in Bridgerton spoke to her daughter about love being a choice, which I find to be a wonderful description of life and love. We choose how we perceive everything that comes our way. How long to give it space in our thoughts, bodies, etc. A hard concept to wrap the mind around most of the time, but an amazing concept of confidence non the less. Sometimes working through things daily, hourly, minute by minute, can become a necessity. So…back to how this relates to art.

Karen Hilliard Art | Redwoods - Lighting the Way | Watercolor and Ink — **SOLD**

My mind can get caught up in details and lost in them at the same time. In the past, if something did not look just right, it weighed on my thought process. Now, I don’t really have the time for this circle or merry-go-round so to speak. With such a limited amount of time, I have to focus on what I want to accomplish minute by minute. The most important part of my day is now a tiny human and I do not have the luxury of getting lost in certain mindsets. I am grateful everyday for the new perspective of “slow down, enjoy it!” Each painting has now become more free and has a bit of air to them. Now, I let the paint tell me where it wants to go…even on a portrait which could be quite scary or nerve-wracking. A whole new thought process of choice. Choosing to let go and find comfort in the uncomfortable. I love my tight style of detail oriented pieces as well as my more recent loose ink and watercolor paintings I have been creating. They are still highly detailed as well, just a bit more play with water. Smaller works are more suitable for the time I have allotted presently. While I long to work on larger pieces, I am grateful for any moment at my art table. I had no idea where I was going with this post when I started to write. Trying to keep up with the consistency of my blog and social media is a whole different story for another time. As for now, I enjoy the trials of everyday life and look forward to lessons I can learn. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful Wednesday!

-Karen Hilliard

Tags New Blog, watercolor painting

Chestnuts

The title, “Chestnut Grove,” makes me think about a grove of chestnut trees in the middle of a beautiful field, sparkling and colorful in the fall. The leaves are moving in the wind and changing color, yellow with hints of brown creating a glitter of natural wonders. Along with chestnut trees, another that pops into my mind is a field of maple trees, oak trees, and birch, all changing color and losing their leaves this fall. Chestnut Grove Tea reminds me of being back in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, and seeing the beautiful trees along the roadside as we drive, changing colors along the Fall Color Map. These beautiful states attract visitors from miles away just to drive the picturesque trails through valleys of color. As I sit here in Nevada, sipping this marvelous black tea, I am dreaming about Wisconsin. My new Tiny Painting Series is titled, “Juliet’s Fall,” and it will be released on my website this Friday! These paintings are a series of colorful wonders representative of the photographs taken by our cousin, Juliet. She loves the season of Fall and sent me lovely foliage photos as painting references. When I think about this time of year and the chill forming in the air, I quietly sip my tea and appreciate the changing of the season.

Karen Hilliard Art | Blog | Day Hike — Available SOON!!

“Chestnut Grove,” black tea can be found at Sheffield Spice and Tea Company here in Henderson, Nevada. It is an adorable little shop filled with smells to awaken the senses any time one sets foot inside the doors. I chose a black tea of medium caffeine levels for this week’s blog and am combining it with my Monday blog about my new paintings. This glorious tea has kept me awake and the fires of inspiration have been burning as I smell the lovely chestnut aroma sifting through my studio. This tea contains ingredients such as Ceylon Black Tea with Natural Chestnut Flavor. The Antioxidant level is High and the description says to enjoy it in front of an open fire. Their words make me think about Frank Sinatra and my Grandfather singing, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” as he would roast chestnuts for us in his kitchen. This tea brings me back to fond memories of my loving grandpa once again and I am so happy to have these pictures in my mind, ears, and heart as I paint some fall foliage. I hope this blog entices your senses and I linked the tea if you are not local and would like to purchase it from their website. My paintings will be available soon and if you would like them sooner, please contact me here! Thank you for reading and have a Marvelous Monday.

-Karen Hilliard

Fall Season

Fall is a wonderful time of year. The weather starts to cool in the mornings and hopefully stays throughout the day. If you live in an area with changing seasons, then you can see some amazing variations of colors in the trees. Here in the desert we are lucky to have some oak trees which release their leaves and give a nice yellow hue before they blanket the ground and change to brown. My husband loves the smell of decomposing leaves and it reminds him of his childhood growing up in Wisconsin. His cousin recently sent me lovely photos of the changing leaves throughout the town where she lives and it has sparked my next series of Tiny Paintings. “Juliet’s Fall,” will be released in my Newsletter on November first in a little over a week. This series is about slowing down and taking time to appreciate everything around us. Nature is such a wonderful teacher in this retrospect as well as teaching us many other lessons to learn.

All things in nature take time to grow and develop, then run their course of living their individual existence. This series is about the leaves and the changing of the seasons, also reminding us that as humans, we go through many transformations in life. These changes become chapters in our book of life and our novels expand as we evolve. Trees are fascinating and see so much life pass around, above, inside, through, and beneath them. What would they tell us if we could listen or understand? These small pieces are meant to bring light and color into this world through the cool seasons leading into winter. Fall is a remarkable season filled with warmth from fires lit in the hearth of homes, soup made on people’s stoves to sip with merriment, hot chocolates, teas, and coffees consumed by many. The food of Fall brings everyone together and reminds us to give thanks for everything we hold dear. I love the constant reminder that where I am today, right now in this moment, I wished for it to happen in the past. This colorful series I am about to release heightens all of my senses and brings awareness for everything that is important to me. A very grateful feeling. I hope this Fall is a magical time of year for you as well. You can sign up for my Newsletter on my website or click this link and you will be directed to it. Have a Wonderful Wednesday and thank you for reading!

-Karen Hilliard

Click Play to watch me Painting the New Series, “Juliet’s Fall.” Releasing Soon!!

Pumpkin Patch

Days at the pumpkin patch have been filled with happiness and wonder. Walking into Holvrease and getting greeted by the staff with such joy is a great experience and sets the mood for a fun filled day! Meandering along the path to the pumpkins and choosing a wheelbarrow to collect our treasures also brings a smile to our faces. From the moment we enter to the moment we leave the Patch is full of possibilities. I love watching our daughter run her fingers through the dirt, collect it, and watch it float in the air through her fingertips. Children truly are fascinating. These years of wonder are filled with whimsy and a sparkling personality is being formed.

Karen Hilliard Art | Blog | Pumpkin Patch

Karen Hilliard Art | Pumpkins 2024 Number 10 — AVAILABLE CLICK HERE!

The pumpkin series holds so many meanings for me. Each one wrapped in my memories of where we picked the pumpkin, the weather during the day as it has been vastly different, and the people we were with upon choosing the pumpkin. We think of what good we will create when I finish a painting and the pumpkin is ready to carve. We have made soup, gnocchi, bread, and scones so far. Last year we attempted chocolate chip pumpkin cookies which came out nice but way different than the recipe. So each pumpkin in the “Pumpkins 2024 Series” holds a special place in my mind. Every painting I create does actually since most are from nature and an experience in my life. The memories of going to the Pumpkin Patch with sisters, nieces, friends, cousins, and our loved ones will live in these paintings for all time. I hope these pumpkins bring you joy and a bit of whimsy. What a wonderful world we live in. Thank you for reading and have a marvelous Monday!

-Karen Hilliard

Tags New Blog, Pumpkin Patch, watercolor painting

Apple Cider Cookies

The cookies were a big hit!! Children and Adults loved them! The aroma filled our home with the scent of fresh picked apples right from the farm. Sheffield “Apple Pie Spice” is a lovely blend of Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Allspice, Ginger, and Cloves. This was our free gift when we purchased our teas a couple of weeks ago. The shop owner also gave us a little recipe card for their “Caramel Apple Cookies” which would have made three dozen cookies if made correctly. The recipe is linked above which is free on their website, and I also linked their pie spice which you can order if you would like to purchase it. I used one rounded teaspoon instead of maybe two per cookie and they were a bit more bite sized than the picture showed. My brown sugar was all clumped (afterwards I added an apple slice to help fix this situation) and I think I ended up using one cup of Brown Sugar instead of the Cup and a Quarter Cup the recipe called for. Everyone seemed to like the smaller portions that added a nice pop of flavor to all of our palettes. I think I will use one rounded teaspoon when I make these cookies in the future as well.

Karen Hilliard Art | Pumpkins 2024 Number 6 — **AVAILABLE** CLICK HERE

My family was in town to go to the Pumpkin Patch at Gilcrease Orchard with us and I wanted to make something special for the kids. Pumpkin Soup was a give in and some sourdough with pumpkin added to it accompanied the soup nicely. The cookies were an afterthought because the Orchard also makes delicious apple and pear cider which we had on hand in our fridge. I thought the cider would go nicely in the cookie recipe and substituted it for the apple juice. Each cookie had the delicious flavor of the cider and the kids ended up enjoying the apple cider at the orchard the next day as well. I did not make the Caramel frosting for the cookies but will definitely be trying this next time. If you end up frosting the cookies with the Sheffield recipe, please let me know in the comments, or by contacting me, how they turn out. I would love some feedback. Baking sure does bring everyone together and warms the home in such a wonderful way. I hope you all have a Soulful Sunday and thank you for reading my blogs!

-Karen Hilliard

Tags Apple Cider, New Blog, Pumpkins, watercolor painting

The Art of Whimsy

Karen Hilliard Art Blog | Pumpkins 2024 | Pumpkin Paintings — AVAILABLE

Karen Hilliard Art | Pumpkins 2024 Series Number 1 — AVAILABLE

Whimsical is defined as playful or amusing, also as appealing. This pumpkin series is meant to bring a jovial jive so they dance through the minds of each viewer and take each person to a land of wonderment. The land of awe where anything is possible and the world is full of all the colors on the spectrum. There is a play of light and dark throughout this series including various undertones with different techniques. Water play and detailed brushwork went hand in hand with each piece and the ink came at the beginning, middle, and end. Every time I look upon these pumpkins, I am transported back in time to happy memories of holidays with my family and the warmth this time of year brings. These colorful wonders also ground me into the present moments I am having with my little family at the Pumpkin Patch and watching our daughter explore the natural world. The paintings also give me hope for our future and dreams we have coming into fruition. Consistently putting in the time, hard work, and dedication needed for these goals to become a reality. This series is definitely a fun project for me.

Every year the pumpkins we choose change yet we always try to find the majority for eating. We cook soup, scones, breads, etc. If you have a recipe or a link to one, please share it in the comments below. The previous blog Pumpkin Soup was supposed to be about soup, yet, as writing is a form of art, it took two directions. That blog became one of hope for others and an outstretched hand. This blog comes back to the original sentiment of the series and the loveliness I am trying to spread in the world, one painting at a time. Whimsy means fanciful, which is in one’s imagination, and behavior for which we act. These paintings are a glimpse inside my mind which is a spider web of wondrous thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Each brush stroke, dot of the paintbrush, or pen is a thought from me to you. I see many different images in the lines of my creations and usually am smiling the whole time while working on these fun little pumpkins. I occasionally have a determined or concentrated look on my face and then a chuckle comes from my mouth while the water flows its own way again. These little pieces are meant to bring magic and humor into your life and to be viewed with whimsy. I love how each painting is unique and not one is painted the same!

Wishing you all a Wonderful Weekend! Thank you for reading.

-Karen Hilliard

SOLD!

Tags New Blog, Pumpkin Spice, Pumpkins, watercolor painting