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.

Snowman/Snowlady

Today I taught the Snowman Fleece Throw Make-It-Take-It class. This design is painted freehand and part of the fun is dressing you snow person once you have the basic shape. Today, my demonstration piece was a Red Hat Snow Lady. She is wearing a feather boa and a flashy red hat. It is difficult to paint fine details on fleece, so this snow person is pretty basic If I were painting on a smooth surface (cotton, wood, metal, ..), she would be carrying a red purse. After all, Red Hatters like to shop! The snowmen might be holding a birdhouse or a broom. My students had the option of dressing their snow person any way they wanted. You can see the original sample piece in my posting of November 15, 2008.

My Foyer

We have been working on our house ever since we moved in 3 years ago. There have been big projects and small projects--difficult and easy. One of our current projects is the foyer. Several months ago I started a mural in the style of Rufus Porter but had to stop as we started a construction project in another part of the house that required putting furniture in front of my work. Over the weekend we removed a tile floor from the foyer in preparation for laying new flooring so the mural MUST be finished. Today I started working on it again.

Rufus Porter was an itinerant artist who worked in New England and traveled as far south as Virginia between 1820 and 1840. It was less expensive for people to have a mural painted than to import wallpaper, so he found a lot of work. Some of his murals are still in existence and have been preserved. His style was what we call today New England Primitive. In addition to being an artist, he was a teacher and an inventor. He also founded the Scientific American magazine. He was a really interesting man.

So, here is my mural so far. It still needs a lot of trees and bushes, some sheep on the hillsides, a duck in the millpond. Once all the details are painted it will be time to paint the foreground bushes and trees to finish it off.

My new "nephew"

My sister got a new Cavalier King Charlies Spaniel a few weeks ago. She sent me a photo and I have done a colored pencil portrait of little Newton. This one is really small, about 2x3.

Pet portraits are a perfect gift for the pet lover for any occasion. If you are interested in a pet portrait, please visit my website and see how you can order one.

New project

I can't believe it has been more than a month since my last post. I have been busy teaching classes and time just got away from me. My classes are finished for the season and now I can concentrate on new projects.

This week I designed a new fabric painting project that will be a Make-It-Take-It at the December meeting of Town and Country Decorative Painters. This is painted using DecoArt SoSoft fabric paint on a light weight fleece throw. Painting on fleece is a challenge because of the nap. If you are going to paint on fleece, select a subject that is not highly detailed and is suited to showing texture. In applying the first layer of paint, it is necessary to scrub the paint into the fleece if you want fairly solid coverage.

This design is a snowman. The first step is to scrub an off-white color into the fleece with a deerfoot stippler to create three snowballs that make up his body. While the paint is wet, you can scrub in the shadows and the highlights. Then it is a matter of using flat, filbert, and liner brushes to dress him and apply details. The last step is to go back to the deerfoot stippler to add the snow on the ground with the same colors you use on the snowman. The ground cover will look better if it is not scrubbed in to the fabric as solidly as the snowman.

A fabric project

Each year the Town and Country Decorative Painters makes a painted quilt to support our annual retreat. The quilt always follows the theme of the retreat. The theme for the 2009 retreat is Painting Safari. Each square of the quilt is to be decorated with the likeness of a jungle critter. I was assigned a parrot. The design on my square is a Macaw. The retreat committee provides the fabric. This year there is a leaf design on the fabric. The square is painted using DecoArt So-Soft fabric paint. The parrot is painted as a vignette. That is, the edge just fades off rather than being a hard, finished edge or including the whole bird.

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.