A Return To Birds

No, I couldn't stay away from birds for too long.

I think I got just a little sloppy with my paint and the red bled into the blue in a couple of places.  This guy seems to be a little fluffed up.  It must be cold wherever he is.  

Just a quick little painting to get ready for the holidays.  Enjoy.

One for the Weekend (Pin Up Girl, Feet Up)

A pin up to last you though the weekend.    This one, too, is red, with a green background.  I'm gonna claim Chritmasness because of it.

Ok, now on to a funny story.  I painted this last night during the worst storm of the year. It was, of course, dark.   I got all set up, mixed a few colors, had just started putting brush to paper when..... the power went out.  I had to immediately rethink my strategy.  A quick trip to the office to get a flashlight.  Then a better idea.  A headlamp.

Power was out for about 3 hours last night, and this got painted by LED headlamp.  Not optimal conditions, but interesting.  Given the circumstances, I think this turned out really well.

I had a lot of fun painting it in the dark.  Hope you enjoy viewing it.

Pin Up Girl, Bending Leg

This is the second one, so I guess I'm starting a series.  Though if I am going to paint a series of painting, this is a good one to pick.  

I didn't notice this quite as much looking at the real picture, but I might have to darken the background a bit to make her stand out just a bit more.

Yes, there is a bit of backrun on this painting, and I thought about going in and trying to get rid of some of it.   But I rather like backrun.  Watercolor is the only  medium in which you see it, and it really makes paintings distinctive.  So, I decided to leave it.  

As with them all, I had fun painting this one.  Hope you enjoy it too.

A Departure From Birds and Flowers (Pin Up Girl)

 I am trying to paint much more loosely.  On this painting I got the entire sheet wet, blocked in some basic colors, then went back to put in details.

You can see that the paper is really warped.  I used some student grade paper that I had gotten for my kids.  I don't know why I did that, but I did.  I quickly realized my mistake.  I couldn't control the water at all.  Everything flowed everywhere.  I think you can see what colors held the most weight on this paper.  I was hoping to have a nice blue background, but when I went to block in some red and grey, BAMMO, back runs.  Oh well, that's ok.

Letting things dry, I went back and, using very little water, started to put in some details and shading.  This is what I came up with.  I got some good, and some bad.  I think its a good effort, but you decide for yourself.

Thank you and enjoy.

Chinese Lanterns

Thanks to our friends over at The Frugal Crafter, I've got another painting for you.

I dind't have a ton of time to do this, and having previously seen her video, I knew this one wouldn't take forever to do, so I gave it a shot.

Notice that this is a lot looser painting than most of mine.  It really does kind of feel good to let go and not worry about things for a bit.  I just figures, well, I'm not really expecting a whole lot, so I'll just throw the paint on and see what happens.  Well, much to my surprise, it turned out pretty good.  I even think I learned a few techniques that I'll be able to work into my every day paintings.

Well, Here it is, I hope you enjoy it, and thanks to Lindsey at The Frugal Crafter.

Holiday Cards

Here they are!  Hot off the... desk.  A batch of Christmas  Holiday cards.  I think they turned out pretty nicely.  They are painted on Strathmore Watercolor Cards.   I got mine at our local hardware store.  The cards are 140 lb paper, with a nice fold in the middle and come with an envelope for each.

Yes, these poinsettias are a bit stylized.  I tried a few (ones you didn't get to see) with fatter leaves, and it just didn't seem to have quite as much movement or life to them.  Each leaf or petal has a slightly different color than its neighbor.and the center has a nice yellow patch to punch it up.

I do have to give a bit of thanks to Lindsay Weirich at TheFrugalCrafter.  Her YouTube channel has a bunch of fun stuff like this, and I stumbled upon her page at the right time.  I was looking for something to paint on these cards , and she had a great tutorial.  So Lindsay, thank you.

Well, thats all for now.  Hope you like them.

Prepping for Christmas cards

Last year it was trees.  This year I am thinking I'm gonna do poinsettias.  I saw a little tutorial on this and thought I would give it a go myself.  Yes, these leaves are a little stylized.  The real ones are a bit fatter.  I might have to do a page of these where I do a bit fatter leaf, but I think these are gonna be what goes on the Christmas cards this year.

The two on the left have a yellow ochre behind them,  on the right azo yellow.  Not exactly sure the direction I'm gonna go.  Brighter, more in your face, or a bit more demure.    I'll decide after the next group of tests.

McWay, slightly differently

I've painted McWay falls before.  This time from a slightly different angle.  And this time I set out to have different values in the paintings. Definitely trying to get the closest stuff to have the highest values and the darkest hues.  The water I think is ok, and the isthmus I think is fairly good, but I think I got the tree on the left a little too dark.  It doesn't look like it sits back quite far enough for me.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn't get the tree in the foreground quite dark enough.  hmmm.

For anyone that doesn't know, this is a little cove that sits on the California coast near Big Sur.  Only about a billion pictures have been taken of the place.  I've not actually been there.  Ok, if you followed the above link you will see that my painting doesn't have quite the color the real place has, but that's kind of California today.  We haven't had a good rain all summer and everything, I mean everything is brown.

Well, anyway, there is my little picture.  Hope you all  like it.

New Palette: Follow up

Re-organizing my palette and charting my colors may have been the best move I have ever made.  I started a new painting yesterday and everything went smashingly.  Ok, ok, let me pump the brakes for a second.  It's still me painting, so the ceiling on the painting isn't all that high.  But having the colors correlate to the color wheel made mixing things soooooooo easy.  I used to have everything compartmentalized.  Blues all the way over here, reds all the way over there, yellows are in their own corner too, and green has blue and yellow, hmm ... where to put them.

Well, now I can easily see how my colors relate to each other, and can mix any secondary or tertiary colors with ease.  And since I don't really like using grey from a tube because it never seems to really be the shade of grey that I want, I can quickly make it up.

I don't expect any John Singer Sargent's or Winslow Homer's to come off my easel any time soon, but I'm totally excited to be able to see the colors and how they work together much better than I ever had been able to before.

New Palette

Ok, here it is, my new palette.  I've got my colors arranged loosely according to the color wheel.  Yes, I can see that there is no bottom on this wheel.  The best part is knowing that there are 12 colors that they are basically in the right order, I can quickly and easily make my own grey.

I took it upon myself to make a little cheat sheet for myself too.  If I actually use it, I'll always know what colors I'll be using.  I'll also know what colors to refill each others with, and which ones could or should be replaced with different colors.  Of course that last one will require a new card to be made up.

I've not put down any of my earth tones  I'll put them directly on the palette when I need them for the time being.  Then I'll see how much I end up using them maybe even give them their own area.

Anyway, it's not rocket science, but there it is.

Green Apples and a Clean Palette

 Mmmmmm, who doesn'l love tasty delicious apples.  They are nutritious, delicious, and I'm told that if you eat one a day no doctors can be around you.  It must be kinka like that garlic/vampire thing.  I don't really know why apples and doctors can't get along, but so be it, more apples for me.

For about the past month, I've been trying to use the last of all the paint I had on my palette without introducing any new paint.  In this painting I have exhausted all of my yellow, nearly all the red, and all the green.  What's left you ask,  a little vandyke brown, some purple and both light and dark cerulean blue.

These paintings were actually done with almost no paint of any kind that has green in the title.  I had just a dab of viridian, and you can see it just slightly in the top painting.  the bottom one has none.

In looking at the bottom apple, I should have put a different stem on it and called it a green tomato.  I think it turned out more like a tomato.  LOL.    Well, anyway, tomorrow I start with a totally clean palette.


Its been a long time coming that I clean and reorganize my palette.  When I first set it up I had only about 6 colors, then slowly added more, and kinda just lumped the colors together.  Now that I have read up on color theory a little bit, I really want to group things a bit differently.  I'm gonna go with some sort of warm, cool, and earthy groupings.  Wish me luck.  And while I get them all worked out, enjoy some apples.

Melons and Carrots

I've got a watercolor painting book I've kind of bene working through.  I thought it would be kinda fun to try to duplicate many of the paintings in the book.  This is one of them.  Carrots and Melons on a table.  I'm trying to work quickly, both drawing and painting.  I did this wet in wet, and up on my easel, instead of laying on my desktop.  I still need to let the colors come together more on the paper instead of mixing on the palette, but i'll get there.

Enjoy.

Daughter, Again

Ok, so, after I painted my daughter last week, I thought I would take another shot at it this week.

The good:  I don't have, or she doesn't have, hay stack hair.  last weeks hair, I thought, was completely ghastly.

I used my newly reclaimed paints.  As it turns out, it has several disks which are pretty good flesh tones.

The bad:  I don' think my daughters nose and mouth completely line up.  and one of her nostrils seems a bit wide.  Oh well.  If I was a pro, I'd worry about it.  But since I'm not, I think it looks pretty good.

Hope you like it.

King Me

Last week I was a little frustrated with my painting and a friend of mine suggested I look at things a bit differently and use different colors or different paints to paint my pictures.  Well, I've got some old paints that were made in West Germany.  I don't know what West Germans knew about paint or anything.  I do know that the colors in this set are kind of different and mostly opaque.  When I say they are kind of different, what I mean is that 7 different blues, none of which match with my existing french ultramarine, pthalo blue, cerulean blue deep or cerulean blue.  It's the same thing with the 6 greens, 7 reds and 5 yellows.  

I had used this set for about a week when I first started painting  but couldn't get used to the colors.  They are just weird.  But for this painting I mixed and mixed and came out with colors that I think are pretty good.  In fact, I made a deal with myself.  If Im gonna paint with a wide swath of colors, I can't mix a big pool of one color and keep dipping it in.  I have to make a small pool of it, and add too it or change it each time I dip into it.  You can see in the body of the bird there are reds oranges and yellows all throughout.  And the blue of the bird is at least 4 different shades throughout.  

The log the bird is sitting on started as a really pale grey, like it was really bleached out.  then it got a bit darker grey, blue, yellow, green and finally it is what it is.  I don't think I'm done with this one, you might see hime make a return on this sit in a finalized form, but for now, I'm back and having fun with some new paints.  Trying to mix any kind of a normal color with these crazy paints is fun in itself.  Thanks for the nudge Kelly Murphy.

Junipero Serra

If you have ever been to my state of California, and been lucky enough to travel to Santa Barbara, and have taken a trip to the Santa Barbara Mission, then you have probably seen Junipero Serra.   For the rest of you, just look to the left.  Junipero was instrumental in founding the Mission and also in creating the El Camino Real, the road up and down California that connected all the missions.

So, I'm trying very hard to paint with larger strokes, at least in the initial stages of the painting, and keeping thing much wetter when I paint.  I've also been keeping my paper up on my easel, instead of nearly level, which is how I normally paint.

Beginning with basic colors and washes and working my way to progressively smaller brushes and finer strokes, I'm hoping to create an image o f the picture I'm painting, not necessarily a reproduction of it.  I try to think of it as if I am looking through a filter with many layers of gauze or hose on it.  Each time I paint a layer on my painting I can take a layer off the filter.  Therefore when I start things are quite fuzzy and I can't make out any detail.  After several layers, the details come more into focus.  As long as I stop painting before all the layer have been taken off the filter, I can't paint the fine details.  Thats what I tried to do with this.

You can easily see the outline and if you allow your mind, you can see details like his fingers and his nose, but if you look closely, you'll see that I didn't actually paint any of those.

Well, I had fun with this, but think I got a little carried away with it.  Enjoy.

Daughter

Ok, well, I had good intentions with this.  Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite like I had hoped.  He has a kind od smashed in head, and a squatty face.  Hmmmm.  Where did It all go wrong.

I thought that a lot of this painting actually went right.  It's unfortunate that her hair really spoiled a lot of the painting.  I threw a blue background on, with a little salt, just to try it out.  Hmm, I might have to try another portrait.  Hopefully, whomever I paint will look better than this.

McWay Falls

Ok, this is a quick sketch, a trial of sorts, for a picture to be painted later.  I did it on cheap paper, but there are some things I really like about this.  For those of you who have followed my paintings, you know that my paintings have been very tight in the past and have been getting looser and looser recently.  This painting displays some of my best wet in wet to date.  

The parts I really like:  the beach and the trees on the left hand side.  I've been trying to get the whole paper wet with paint at the beginning of the painting, letting all  the colors mix and trying hard not to force the paint to do what I want it to do.  In this painting I let the paint do what it wants to do, and tried to stay hands off.  The way the water dissolves into the sand of the beach, or the beach into the water, whichever way you want to look at it, makes me happy to see.  The layering of the trees also makes me happy.  Ok, I got a little too much saturation of color in the distant trees, but the technique and thinking was right.  I can fix the saturation in the next one.  and in the foreground, it looks as though there are 3 or 4 layers of pine trees.  I tried mixing a few different colors of green so that it didn't look like one giant green blob.  I got at least a few different colors.   and the closest ones, while they were wet, I just threw in a little purple for no particular reason.

I should say at this point that painting on a larger scale seems to be easier. It was fun to just scribble in some lines and see it come out close to what I wanted to see.  And for some reason with a bigger brush, this was easier.

I had to put in some leaves from the gum tree in the foreground.  I think in the finished piece, I'll put in even more leaves.  It really did help to push the rest of the painting back.

I'm not a big fan of how the rocks turned out.  I'll have to work on those.  My intent was just to show some texture, but I think I over did it.

Overall, I'm happy with this and if I get a few things worked out with it, I know that its intended recipient will be ecstatic about it.

Thanks for viewing.

Lone Tree in the Snow

Ok, so today I have a series of pictures for you.  Trying to work wet in wet in the background, and dry brush in the foreground.

You can see in the first photo, I've got the tree sketched out, and have blocked in some colors.  I put just a little color in the sky.  Maybe the color from the distant hills is reflected in the sky just a bit.





This second one, I've got the tree in and some rocks and grass.  I tried leaving a little white here and there, especially on the ground where I think the light might be reflecting off the snow.

Adding details to the tree and to the grass.  The tree in the photo has some really deep grooves in it.  It's pretty wind warn and has a real ancient feel to it.  

 A few more details on the tree and a few more sprigs of winter grass and I'm just about done.  Not only did I use many shades of brown and red in the base color of the tree, but I'm not using a single color in all the shadows.  I think I've got 5 or six different colors.

Here it is framed and hanging on the wall.  I noticed after looking at it that there really wasn't enough differentiation between the near and far hills,  I went back and put just a touch of blue to create a hill.

I really like this painting, and the woman I painted it for really likes it.  It is currently hanging in her office.  It really makes me feel good to hand off a painting like this that someone really likes.  Hope you all like it as much as I do.  Thanks so much.

Weekend Sketching

I love reading books.  I've probably read 30 or so already this year, and the latest was a watercolor book.  In it, like in all books of this sort, the artist tells you how to paint a myriad of different things and different techniques in which to accomplish this.

So, I decided to take this particular artist and author up on his challenge and started painting a few of the paintings from the book.  To the left is the second version of this painting.  It's not quite like his, but its not bad for a quick weekend sketch.

The second painting is my first attempt at the same scene.  Not bad, but not nearly in the league as the top one.

This last one is just one more that I took from him.  Again, not bad for a quick sketch.

I should say that these are all on my sketch paper, which is very similar to mixed media paper in texture.  That is, its smooth and almost a little waxy.  I got it so that I could easily take it with me and paint on location.  The air here is super dry and when I venture outside to paint, I find that I often have trouble keeping moisture on the paper.  Thus this paper.

Anyway, enjoy.

A Few More Sketches

 This post is all about quick sketching.  I'm trying to learn to draw things better, and hopefully, that will help me paint things better.

Here are just a few of the things I've been able to sketch and paint quickly.  None of it is great art, but what it is is great fun.

Portrait of a Friend of Mine

I've been trying to work back slowly into this watercolor thing, and I like painting birds but.....I guess I just needed to do something a bit more.  

In addition to posting my artwork here, on my art blog site, I post to G+.  Somewhere on G+ I ran into a fellow artist and contributor named Kelly.  I didn't really wanna paint a picture of myself (tried it, bad subject matter that turned into a bad portrait), but I wanted to paint a portrait.  Kelly was gracious enough to allow me to paint a picture of her.  Two days later and this is what I came up with.

BTW, if you are interested in some good artwork and an uplifting look at life, check out her blog site.

So, I think I'm getting a little better with hair, though its a long slow process.  And I guess I can say the same about portraits in general.  Looking back at the first portraits I've done, I see some really rudimentary work.  This one, while not a Rembrandt by any stretch is miles ahead of what that one was.

I feel like I am not nearly as afraid to leave a hard edge on the paper.  I used to be afraid to do that and had to smooth all the edges before I could move on.  It made it an extremely long process to do anything.  Like probably 2 or 3 times as along to paint any given picture.  Yes, on this I did smooth a few edges out.  I didn't feel as though I should leave all hard edges, but a few weren't too bad.  It's a little unfortunate that I used the mixed media paper instead of watercolor paper because the water kept pooling and made it harder than I think it had to be.  But I just thought that with as hot as its been here, the watercolor paper would dry too fast.

Here is the picture I used as a reference.  I had a little trouble with the shadows in her hair on the right hand side of her head.  If I were to do this one agian, I would try to get that a bit better, but I'm happy with it.  I think the representation of Kelly is pretty good.  And what is more important is that when I sent this picture to her, she liked it.  In the end, I think that is more important than producing a great work of art.  I got the enjoyment of painting it, and she got the enjoyment of seeing it.  For me that's enough.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did.  Enjoy.

I must really like red heads

This is obviously a very proud bird.  He's sitting on a branch with his chest puffed out.  There must be a female on a brach close by.  He seems to be looking off to the side, so perhaps she'e just off the page to the left.

For those that have followed my paintings for a while now, you can see that I am a lot less "tight" with my paint.  I'm trying hard to let things be, and just allow the paint to fill in the spaces it needs to fill.  I've seen that if I fidget with things and try to get them "right" the only thing I can be certain of is that things won't look "right".  If I let the paint do it paint thing, things look a bit better and less fiddled with.

Well, its a quick painting that I had fun with, hope you all like it.

Some Red Head

Ok, here is a quick sketch of a little red bird.  Not exactly what kind of bird it is.

Working on painting loose, but may have gotten a little too loose around his head and on the branch in the foreground.

All in all it's not a bad little painting.

I've looked at this painting several times over the past day or so, and I keep trying to figure out what this guys story it.  I haven't quite gotten it, but whatever he is doing, it looks like he needs to wear gloves for it.  Maybe they are driving gloves?   Not really sure.  Well, anyway, enjoy.

Quick weekend sketches

Some quick weekend sketching fun.  Ill be honest ins saying most of what I did was pick through garage sales, and watch the kids, but I did find a little time to  paint.  Not much mind you, but a little.  This first picture is of a stone statue that sits on my front porch.  I'm trying to paint more quickly and more intuitively, rather than trying to exactly replicate what I see.  So here it the cat in all its glory, just sitting there staring at traffic as it goes past.

This picture is one I'd previously drawn. It was just sitting there in my sketch pad begging for me to do something with ti.  So here it is.

Finally, the thing everyone wants.  A picture of an old cat tree.  LOL.  Well, I know one member of the family that couldn't get by without it.  (mostly because the dog can't climb.)

A light hearted posting today.  Enjoy, and thank you.

Owl at night

Ok, so they cant all be winners.  This one got away form me pretty early on, and I couldn't quite tell how to write the ship.  I just kept painting and painting.

After only about 5 minutes of painting I decided I didn't like this.  But having as thick a head as I have, I just kinda kept plugging away at it.  I will admit that the longer I painted, the better I felt about this.  I think one of my big problems is that when you paint owls, you have to put on two eyes.  You never see owl pictures with one eye.  The yes are what make the owl.  So... since the eyes are such a focal point of the owl, you have to have them look correct.  Right from the beginning (I mean even the drawing) I think my eyes were not quite right. Now they are different sizes, and that sets the painting off.  Grrrrrr... Oh well, that's why these are practice and I have an actual day job.

On the bright side, I painted lots of layers on this.  I would bet that there are places that have as many as 8 or 9 layers of paint.  And on the wing closest to you, you can really see that.

I've been trying to paint in more, lighter layers.  Trying to give my paintings a bit of depth.  The down side, is that in the back ground, on the inital layer, I had branches behind the owl.  Adding subsequent  layers has rendered them invisible.  Oh, well, take the good with the bad.

I still had fun painting this one.  I've got  friend who was looking for an owl painting, and this one just might end up in her office.  Thanks for viewing.

Oriole

Here is the latest.  It is, as you can see, an oriole.  Not sure what I liked so much about this picture when I stated painting it, but I think it turned out nice.  A lot of times, it seems when you paint birds, you end up doing them in profile.  Maybe I liked this one because it wasn't in profile.

He's just sitting there checking out his surroundings.

Hope yo enjoy this one.  Thanks for the views.

One Great Tit

Ah Hah!  Gotcha.  I posted a picture of a bird.  I don't think that's what you were expecting.  I love doing that.  Last year I posted a picture of some cantaloupe  melons.  I titled my post something like a great pair of melons.  I got more hits on that than I had on my site total to that point.

Well, as I have said so many times, I love painting birds.  Something about them makes me happy.  I always like to make up stories about them as I am painting.  And they all seem to have individual moods.

Usually when I paint, I paint from black an white pictures.  I did that with this one.  It really helps me see contrast.  But where I am able to see a lot of contrast, I often get my colors a little wrong.  On this guy, I should have had a grey tail.  He originally had a beautiful yellow tail, but once I finally looked at a color picture, I realized I should have given him a grey tail. I quickly tried to make an adjustment, but.....  

Ok, now let's talk about a little of the good for a second.  I basically painted this in about 4 layers.  I tried hard to leave his chest a little lighter and his belly a little darker.  I think I got it on the yellow.  And I was worried that his head wouldn't come out quite right when I started, but i really like how it turned out.

Well, hope you like this one.  Thank you.

European Robin in Winter

Yesterday was a really busy day for me.  Running non stop from the time I got to work, until nearly quitting time.  I did find just enough time to paint this little guy.  I must have been in a bit of a dour mood yesterday, because he seems to be in bit of a huff.  Let's hope I wasn't showing my frustrations.

This on is from a winter time picture.  The bird has obviously gotten his down up a bit to keep warm.  I tried to paint it with all cooler colors.

Well, he was fun for the 5 minutes or so I got to paint him.  Enjoy, and thaks for the view.

Painting with my daughter

One of the things I really love to do is paint with my daughter.  She has absolutely no fear about painting anything.  Her paintings might be one color, or they may be A plethora of colors.  But whatever the color just goes at it with little fear and great enthusiasm.  This past weekend we decided to paint a whale.  I spread some butcher paper on the kitchen floor and taped it down, she grabbed the iPad to look up whales.  She decided on the one to paint, in this case a killer whale, and I drew it.  I got her the largest paint brushes I had, and sat down beside her.  She told me some great stories about whales:  What they eat, what they like to do in their free time, where they go on vacation, etc.

There was supposed to be a lesson about whales to go along with the painting, but I think I got more of the lesson than she did.  Thats OK, I had a great time painting with her.

Old Truck in Front of Barn

Ok, first of all, let me say that this is still a work in progress.  Secondly, let me tell you a little story about this.

A colleague of mine, knowing my propensity for all things rusty and wheeled, sent me a picture he took of this truck.  I couldn't help but attempt a painting of it.  I drew it, and painted it.  It looked horrible.  I couldn't stand it.  Even my colleague looked at it and asked if I had regressed in my painting.

I literally started pouring on the water and rubbed most of the paint off the truck.  Having done that, I was left with a painting that still had color, but which was infused with tiny white dots where the paint had been taken off.  It still looked horrible.  So, here is what I decided to do.

I admitted to myself that I'd wasted a sheet of paper and used it for some practice.  I stood, instead of sitting, and started swabbing on paint, not worrying about color or exact placement of paint.  In short, painting more loosely.  You can see I got some red on the roof of the bar,  a big swab of blue on the side of the barn, some green for trees, and yellows, reds and greens for grass.  While still wet, I just flicked in a few weeds.  I touched up the paint on the truck, and POW, a huge difference. I couldn't believe the transformation of this picture. It went from something that was totally drab and blasé to something in which the truck actually stands out in the picture.

I know that I still have a little bit of work to do painting but I couldn't believe how much better it look when I stopped trying to paint so tightly.

I hope you all enjoy it I am going to be posting the finished painting soon. Thank you.

The End of Summer

Painting with my daughter has been an incredible sense of joy for me.  We sat down and painted a garden, and this is one of the things I came up with.  Watermelon from our garden.  Tried to give the melon a little depth, but not sure I really got it.  Regardless, it is so fun to paint with someone who has no fear in what she does.   I am trying to think less and do more with my painting, just like her.  Also trying to worry less about detail and focus more on getting the feeling of the painting across to the viewer.

Well, enjoy, and thanks for viewing.

House Plant

I promised that I was going to get back into panting,  Maybe I won't paint every day, but I'll put out more work than once a month like I did over the summer.  This past weekend, after I was doing domestic stuff (shampoo'ed the carpets in the entire house, cleaned two bathrooms, cleaned the kitchen, scooped the cat box and made myself a sandwich), I took a few minutes to draw and paint a house plant that I have.

The kids were at a birthday party, and I figured I had about 4 to 5 hours to get everything done.  After the previously mentioned housework, I figured I had at most 30 minutes left.  A quick drawing, a splash of paint, a quick second splash and I figured I was gonna be out of time very soon.  A quick clean up, and I was done.  Shortly after the kiddo's returned.  All in all a very successful day.

I bought a book of 90 lb paper last year, always intending to use it to do some sketching on, but never getting around to it.  Well, I pulled it out and used it for this painting.  I'll admit it's not quite as nice as my 140 lb paper, but its not bad for something quick.  As you can see, the paper didn't really buckle or bubble or anything.  There is some very slight warping, but given that the page was wet for 15 minutes I think it held up really well.  There are 40 sheets of paper in this book,   I'm looking forward to filling up the remaining 39.

Hope you enjoy.

Staring off into the distance

I know I keep saying that I am going to start painting again with more earnest.  But it seems that life keeps intruding on my art time, and I seem to be wasting all my time with silly work and family.

Well today, finally, I was determined to paint something.  This is a little nuthatch on a broken pine limb.  He seems to be staring intently at something off to the side.  I'm hoping that he's soon gonna have a little lunch.

Well, I don't have a big write up about this little guy, he's just a nice little bird.  One of what I am hoping is gonna be many to come,  Enjoy.

Speed Painting With My Daughter (Now with Sparkle)

I love painting with my daughter.  Like me, she makes up stories about the things she paints.  (She got that from me, and I in turn, got it from Bob Ross.)  Her stories are always outrageous and seldom have any place in reality.  Perhaps thats the imagination of a 5 year old.  I could just sit next to her and listen to her stories all day long, but I'm lucky enough to be able to paint with her while being regaled with these outlandish stories.

This past Saturday we were sitting at the craft table painting when we were just finishing out first paintings when she decided that fruit would be a good thing to paint.  I would quickly sketch out a couple of pictures (one for her and one for me) and we would set out to paint.  She got to the point where fruit was a solid color with a green leaf all lobbied onto the paper in one gleeful moment.  We both ended by laughing and painting furiously.

Then she remembered that she has glitter watercolors.  We had to revisit and add the glitter (she calls it shimmer or sparkle.)  The following was my contribution to our time together.

Apples and cherries were the first pictures we did.
 

I didn't have time to draw my own grapes, so I just freehanded them.

This peach has a generous amount of shimmer on it.  I guess it is substituted for fuzz


No, a chili isn't really a fruit, but she suggested and I obliged

Second attempted portrait.

First portrait attempted.

Strawberries definitely have shimmer.

A tree to end out fun for the day.