Painting Day!!!

I finally got to spend time in my studio painting instead of organizing. It felt good. I decided to do a little piece just to warm up and get ready for bigger work. I took an apple from my kitchen and painted it in pastels on sanded paper. It is about 5x5. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's effort.

Chambersburg Arts Council Show

I got a letter yesterday telling me that one of the pieces I submitted was juried into the annual Miniature Show sponsored by the Arts Council in Chambersburg, PA. I have been honored to have at least one piece selected for the show every year for the last several years. I am especially pleased with this piece. "Lily" is a graphite rendering of my friends' cat. The show runs from the beginning of November through the end of the year at the Arts Council offices in downtown Chambersburg.

Lily
graphite on paper, 3.5x3.5

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum

Each year the city of Franklin holds a festival called Light-Up Night. It involves the Christmas parade, decorated store windows, lighting the City Christmas tree and fireworks. It is a wonderful night and always very well attended. One of the annual activities associated with Light-Up Night is a Christmas tree display in the Barrow Civic Theater--our downtown jewel, We are very fortunate as a small community to have a theater that is home to an active community theater group and that sponsors performances by traveling groups as well as our community Silver Cornet Band and the community orchestra. So, before Light-Up night various community organizations put up trees in the theater lobby and decorate them. This year, I did the tree for the Franklin Fine Arts Council. Since I just joined the Arts Council, I didn't have a lot of time to plan the tree. I went through my small paintings and decorated the tree with ribbon, paint brushes, and a number of my small works in oil, watercolor, and colored pencil. The tree topper is a clean (fancy that) wooden palette and the small painting featured just below the palette is an oil painting of the County Court House on Light-Up night with fireworks behind it.

A difficult subject

A Visit to the Aquarium

5x7

colored pencil on Bristol Plate (smooth)

The challenge in this little piece is the aquarium lighting. Everything in the picture has a blue tint. To achieve this, after the little boy was completed, I applied a light wash of blue over him. The whale was rendered using various blue pencils in addition to the white and black so that it would have the blue glow that was in the photograph. See if you can find the lost edges on the whale.

When I am ready to frame this piece, I think I am going to mat it down to about 3.5x4 so that it will be eligible for submission to a miniature show.

Testing My Skills

I tried my first colored pencil portrait today. It is far from perfect, but for a first attempt, I am not unhappy. A little work on the skin tones and the eyes will make a huge improvement in the finished work. With some more practice, I will be painting quite respectable portraits. Here is the pencil portrait and the original photo from which I was working. The size is approximately 3x3.

New Pet Portrait - Lucky

I finished up a portrait today that will be a gift for a friend. This is my first portrait using colored pencil. I am very pleased with the result. The reference photo had a very dark background and I liked the idea of the shiny coat against the really dark background, so I painted this piece on black cardstock. The photo is not entirely accurate. It is very difficult to photograph black cardstock because the dark background causes the camera to read colors a little differently. This little portrait is about 4x5 before matting.

Colored Pencil Miniature

This week I have been working on a miniature in colored pencil. You may remember from previous posts that miniatures are very small paintings-usually not larger than 24 square inches. This piece is 4x4, or 16 square inches. It is painted on Bristol Vellum paper. I think that an even smoother surface would be better for miniatures so that detail will be easier to achieve. It is also important to keep your pencil point very sharp. A dull point will not allow you to achieve sharp details in your work. It felt good to get back to working on really small pieces again. I have not really done a new miniature for nearly a year.

New Miniature Paintng

It has been a while since I started this little piece, but here is Sadie. Sadie was painted on a 4x4 gesso board square. The technique was a Burnt Sienna underpainting with oil overlays. The world is made up of dog people and cat people. I am a dog person and I find it very difficult to paint cats. Cats' faces are flatter and have less dimension than dogs'.

A Portrait of my Aunt

I do not consider myself a portrait painter. This is only the second portrait I have ever painted. The first was a watercolor portrait of my mother. This painting is a 4x4 oil on board painted from a photograph of my Aunt. I have to say I am pleased with the way it turned out, generally. I am planning to send it to her for her birthday.

Tiny Bottles

Here is a completed miniature. I haven't really worked on a miniature for a while. This piece is a 4x4 clayboard surface. A Burnt Sienna underpainting using acrylic paint was the first step. This underpainting is a value study for the final painting. Because the acrylic paint dries quickly, developing the value study in this way allows you to quickly move on to the business of applying the oil overlays.

Oil overlays are applied using water mixable oils.

A new miniature

I've been working on this little piece for over a month. That is, I started it over a month ago before I went into the pumpkin patch and I have just been able to get back to it. It is painted in Genesis on a 4"x4" piece of gesso board. So, here it is: "Summer Tea".

Another Painting Sold

I got the best news today. One of the paintings that I entered in the 16th Annual Seaside Miniature Art Show in Nags Head was sold. I am so very pleased. This piece is painted in Genesis Heat-Set Oils on a 4x4 piece of gesso board.

A Trio of Pears
SOLD

Oh, Joyous Happy Day!

This has been a wonderful day. The weather has definitely turned warm enough to call it spring and we have sandal temperatures.

Today I took some paintings to one of my galleries. I like to periodically change out paintings that have been on display for a while for new ones. While I was there, someone came into the gallery and bought one of my paintings right off the desk--it never even made it to the wall! It is always nice to sell a piece, but it is especially nice to sell a piece that quickly and to meet and talk with the person who bought it.

Montreal Hotel

Watercolor, 4"x4"
SOLD

Seaside Minaiture Art Show

I finally got my submissions mailed off to the Seaside Miniature Art Show in Nag Head, NC, today. I have been trying to decide what to submit. I finally came down to measuring the pieces that were possibilities and discovering that only two of them fit the size requirement. I had a couple of pieces I thought were 6x6 including the frame and they turned out to be 6.75x6.75 to the outside edge of the frame. That made them larger than 40 square inches and therefore they did not qualify. The lesson learned here is that I need to work smaller than the maximum allowed painting size in order to insure that the outside dimensions will fit within the requirement--especially in my watercolors.

Anyway, the two pieces that are now on their way to North Carolina are both painting of pears. The first is called A Pair of Pears and the second is called A Trio of Pears. Both titles are sort of plays on words. These paintings are both done in Genesis Heat-Set oils. The size of the screen images is approximately life-size. Assuming that these pieces are not eliminated for some reason, they will be on sale through the Seaside Art Gallery for $65.00 each. You can see the website for the gallery and the show at www.seasideart.com