Update on 2017 Calendars

2017 calendars have been proofed and are currently in production

$24.95 plus NC tax if applicable
 plus $6.45 Priority Mail shipping, if desired

Pay Pal button available on the right margin or you can bring a check and pick up your calendar in person (Your NC total including tax will be $26.63)

I added quotes this year. Let me know what you think.

Calendars 2017 and please send me your baby images

It is that time of year where I go  through the year's paintings and select what I think are the best for the calendar. Interesting to me, is my favorites seem to be yours also. Almost all of the images I have picked are sold and in your collections.

The largest expense for calendars is always the shipping from the company, so I like to have an idea of how many I might need to order to avoid a second order (shipping cost). If you know that you will want a calendar this year, please let me know. The cost will be $24.95 and I may try first class mail instead of priority shipping for people who can't pick them up.

While I am updating this blog, I'll let you know what I am up to. First, I am working on a series of "newborn" images. If you have one of those hospital images of a little one swaddled in a hospital blanket and are willing to share to with me, I will continue to work to make these look like the correct babies. If  yours is one that I achieve a likeness while I am learning, I will gift you your baby painting, if you allow me to post it so that I can advertise to do this (ALL IF because this is definitely a work in progress)

In addition, I am working on an outline to make this blog more useful, especially to my students and I hope to launch that early in 2017
My big watercolor show deadlines start to pile up at the end of the year and into January.  I have some new experimental work that I hope to enter (and eventually share). These pieces are strong compositionally so that will add to the goal of the blog relaunch of useful information in this forum.


Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

Revised Completely

So far, this is just an i phone image of this painting on my easel.
 Yesterday, while I was warming up, I took from my stack of "something isn't quite right after I have lived with these paintings" and repainted the vase.  I wanted it less tight. Next, I repainted the sunflowers to be a sunny yellow. Better with the yellow, I changed to more purple hydrangeas. The white on the coneflower petals cooled and dulled them. These changes meant that I wanted to brighten the background ....

One change in your painting usually means that something else needs to change...

Totally different
I will look again later and see if I am happy now!!

Summer Bouquet

Summer Bouquet/ oil on canvas board/ 7 x 5/

My garden is filled with clean, intense beautiful flowers including torch tithonia and zinnias. Usually daily, I paint some of them. Most days, I also wipe these little paintings. As soon as I add white to the colors, they lose their intensity. Consequently,  the painting is not at all what I want.
Today, I started again.  I painted with transparent colors as long as possible and then tried to keep from "snuffing out the life" of the painting with the opaques (including white).

Designer Grapefruits

Designer Grapefruits/ oil in stretched canvas/ 8 x 10/

Another painting using thick paint. This time, I also imagined I as painting for a "designer kitchen".

Perhaps also interesting is that this painting was painted over some failed zinnias.

Little Puppy

Puppy/ oil on stretched canvas/ 7 x 5/

This is a little painting where I was working on getting the oil paint applied more thickly. I decided to try adding different mediums to do this. This painting used  Liquid Impasto. The description states This is a semi-gloss, quick-drying, non-yellowing impasto medium that retains crisp textures and brush strokes without any visible leveling. It also extends tube color, provides bulk, and allows more blending time. When dry, it forms a flexible, tough film that can be varnished in the normal way. Use it for heavier brush work or palette knives. It is not recommended for use as a varnish or final coat.

I have also been working through the lessons that Nancy Medina recently provided. I hope that you will se some of her color influences in upcoming paintings. 

Sunflower and Zinnia Study

Sunflower and Zinnia Study/ oil on canvas board/ 5 x 7/

Often, when there are long absences on this blog, there is a trail of ripped paper or wiped canvases at my house as I struggle to work on some new thing that I desperately want to master.

I think this painting may be a breakthrough for me. The recent goals (in oil) are CLEAN color and flowers that don't look "pasted on".
Okay, so "clean color"'
You have to put clean fresh color, mixed to exactly the right color pieces from your palette onto the right place on a clean canvas. That means, when the color is not correct (and you tell this by looking, then looking, then looking), you have to wipe back to the white of the canvas and reapply the correct color. If you try to "mix it" on the canvas to the correct color, it will grow dull (faster if you are using opaques and really greyed out if there are whites in your mixtures).
To be able to wipe back to white, I like the canvas surface I posted last time. I also begin my painting by applying a thin (and wiped) layer of gambol or medium.
The"unpasted part" is harder (for me) and I will write about that next time.

Cross your fingers that this is integrated and that I am truly on a path forward...