Camp Creek Press

Taking our art materials outside.

Drawing and painting in nature.

Appreciating some of the beautiful places in our community: parks, gardens, arboretum.

How could you resist?

Well, here's how (to do a resist!): Draw with oil pastels, then do a watercolor wash. The area drawn with the pastels (oil! not chalk!) “resists” the watercolor. Crayons also work to do a resist, but the oil pastels have more vibrant color and depth.

Now get out there!

Just heard this word this week. With the rising cost of fuel, more people are opting to look into the fun things to do in their own area — just like we were discussing in my last post.

So here's another vote for visiting and appreciating everything your own community has to offer. Take a stay-cation!

Think of the benefits:

• Sleep in your own bed every night!
• The cleanliness of your room is not in question — it may not be 100% clean, but it’s not in question!
• No packing!
• No unpacking!
• No kids whining in the backseat while you’re stuck in traffic! No missed flights or lost luggage!
• Best of all — at the end of your stay-cation, you won’t be totally exhausted and in need of another vacation.

For our part, we sat down and did a little online research and came up with a long list of places to hike and paddle this summer that are within an hour’s distance from our house. And we live in the cornfields of the Midwest, so if we came up with 30 new places to explore, imagine what might be available to you!

Check out:

Get Away on Vacation — at Home

Real Simple: Kick Back, Relax, Vacation at Home

Ideas for the At-Home Vacation

Great Tips/Ideas for Spending Your Vacation at Home

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

George A. Moore

Our art class is visiting a different garden or nature preserve each week. Every time we visit one of these places I think of the people who work so hard to create and preserve them. A bit of woods, a bit of prairie, a special garden — so many wonderful (free!) resources right here in our own backyard.

Our own garden is blooming and growing, gorgeous with color, alive with insects, butterflies, birds, bees, toads. There are anthill cities, ladybugs stalking aphids, birds feasting in the mulberry tree and squabbling over birdseed. So much free entertainment! And when the sun sets, stargazing. There’s so much to do without ever leaving home.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

The creek flooded its banks and made a temporary lake behind our house.

The temporary lake brought a new temporary pet — a baby snapping turtle. With the woods and the creek in your backyard, it’s easy to adopt a little bit of wildlife, watch it, feed it, learn about it, then let it go again.

Last year we found a box turtle just getting into the road and brought him home for a couple of weeks, then carefully returned him exactly where we found him — except, you know, about 12 feet further on his way, on the other side of the road. Turtles are so slow, and pickups so fast.

For it was rather exciting. The little dry ditches in which Piglet had nosed about so often had become streams, the little streams across which he had splashed were rivers, and the river, between whose steep banks they had played so happily, had sprawled out of its own bed and was taking up so much room everywhere, that Piglet was beginning to wonder whether it would be coming into his bed soon.

[T]he California-based State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort to study environment-based education, found that schools that use outdoor classrooms, among other techniques, produce student gains in social studies, science, language arts and math; improved standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and enhanced skills in problem-solving, critical thinking and decision-making. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that time in natural surroundings also stimulates children's creativity. — Richard Louv

Art class this morning at a beautiful nature preserve/park. Cold, overcast, and 30% chance of rain. Not ideal? But who knows what we might see on this cloudy day. Pictures later today!