Madrona Tree WIP 4/30/07

I am able to work on this Madrona Tree painting today so will include another work in progress entry here. I have done the underpainting of the leafy background and will next proceed to darkening that area, hopefully with the intent of darkening that more to make the peeling tree branches "pop" more and remain the center of interest for this painting. More to follow.

Madrona Tree - WIP

Here is the Madrona Tree peeling bark painting WIP that I have done so far. I will continue on with this since I am having so much fun painting it. The background will be of green foliage and leaves, but the center of interest will be this glowing, peeling main branch and bark. These trees are specific to the Pacific Northwest and I was entranced by them as we drove through the mountain highways toward the Oregon coast. Apparently there is a disease which attacks them and they are a dying breed; so sad, as they are so colorful with their peeling bark and wonderful greens amidst the darker green conifers.

More WIPs to follow on this one. I hope to be able to finish with a lush background with greens, blues and yelows, but we will have to see. One more art sale this weekend and then I can work on this more.

Lilacs on Lace

This will be my submission for the online group's April project - lilacs. I tried to stay loose with this and, as usual, when I do that I don't care as much for it, but this is it regardless. It was fun to do and nice to be able to paint again this week.

I have started offering matcutting and archival printing services and had my first printing and matcutting jobs this week. It's enjoyable work, adds a few dollars to my art supply fund and keeps me out of the pool halls and bars. Can't beat that.

NC Tobacco Farm - corrected

I realized, after submitting, that we were in North Carolina, not South Carolina when I took the reference photo for this painting. I corrected that error, as well as following a suggestion from my online critique group (thanks, Rhonda!) where it was suggested that I darken the roofs to highlight the center of interest - the barn and drying sheds. I do like it better with the value shift now.

SC Tobacco Farm

I have had these three paintings on the unfinished pile for quite awhile as I had lost the time to work on them and possibly the inclination after the inspiration left. But, today was the day and I so enjoyed working on them and finishing them. Now, onto the new ideas without guilt!

This sepia painting was inspired on our trip through South Carolina two years ago. There were so many farms set among the rolling green hills, so peacefully. I assume this was a tobacco farm considering what I believe to be large drying sheds and buildings. I may be wrong, but they were pretty farms nonetheless.

Zoltan's Fishermen

The Zion painting has been assigned to the "think on it" pile. It may take that trip to the sink, yet. But, there is no hurry if that is its fate.

I have had this painting, for a family member, on the back burner for awhile as it was on the "think on it" pile, too. I did some refining this afternoon and think it will stand on its own now, for better or worse. It is from step-by-step demo from an old Zoltan Szabo book that I had done once before during the infancy of my so-called painting career. I still like the peacefulness of this scene and enjoyed painting it again.

Zion in Fall

I started this watercolor on canvas in the Thursday painting session and finished it today. It had to be either "punched up" in the color or washed back to white at the sink and start over. I decided to punch up the color and will await a critique to decide whether I make that trip to the sink. This Fredrix watercolor canvas is difficult to work with most of the time, it just gives me fits. I am determined to master it, though, so I keep trying.

Ocotillo

Our Ocotillo has always had nice "foliage" on it and it has grown to be about 12-feet tall, but it hasn't had very many nice blossoms in the Spring. This year it has the nicest blossoms of any year and I am sure some of these will have to find their way into paintings! I guess Ocotillos perform better after having a Winter with some hard freezes since our milder Winters have not produced as many blossoms as this.

Easter Sale

This is my table set-up at this weekend's Easter sale by the ArtChix. It was a moderate success and a lot of fun...a lot of work, too! The fun part is the sale itself; the preparation and setup/takedown aspects are the work part. Today's task is to get everything put away in the studio again.

Office finished

We have officially moved everything into the office area of the new room and, except for a few finishing touches this is finished. After my weekend ArtChix sale anything that doesn't sell (yeah, right!) will likely find its way to these virgin walls. I have decided to store my inventory of paintings on our walls throughout the house as they add color and are more easily viewable if anyone wants to see something. I couldn't show the end wall unit to the right of the one desk in this photo, but we have plenty of storage now which is a delight to have. We decided against going the built-in route. Aside from the expense of that after having the room addition built, from those who have gone that way I have heard that they lost any ability to change things around and rearrange as their needs change. So, I think this will be better for our uses and it is wonderful to have my computer tucked into one end of my art studio since I use the computer a great deal in my artwork.

Now, after the weekend art sale, we start painting the old office/new guest room Monday and will try to get that finished so we can reclaim our garage which has stored furniture, etc. for the duration of our studio build.

New Clayboard Tiles

I have been working on more of these petroglyphs on clayboard "tiles" in preparation for the next ArtChix sale, April 7 and 8. The top two of these struck me as being somewhat "alien" in appearance, but this is a truthful depiction of the petroglyphs found near Moab, UT in Thompson Wash. Although I depicted them as petroglyphs (scraped into the rock), they were actually pictographs (painted onto the rock, usually under a cliff overhang so they have endured for centuries) The bottom right figure was found at a site near Albuquerque, NM and I suspect it is of a chieftain figure and is one of the few petroglyphs I have seen that shows what appears to be a robe or covering. The bottom left figure is from the Fremont people, recognizeable because of the earrings and trapezoidal shape of the figure. These are all 5x7 in size.

Zion Workshop

This is one of our painting days alongside the Virgin River in Zion Nat'l Park. The group to the left is just part of our group, we were spread out over a larger area of the river on this day. I was standing on a bridge to take this photo. Wonderful weather and painting, all-in-all a very successful workshop experience.

Zion Day Two

This is the painting I did while sitting next to the Virgin River in Zion Nat'l Park today. After attending four workshops with Carl Purcell, I feel I am finally starting to "get it", and like the paintings I am doing while here.

Better weather today; pleasant, sunny and warm.

Zion Workshop - Day One

This is my painting from Day One here at the Carl Purcell workshop. It ended up being a miserably rainy, cold day;but I got a good start on this painting before I gave up, went back to the motorhome, put my iPod on Mozart, and finished it in comfort. So far, I think it is my best workshop painting ever, I get so intimidated when at these things that I forget everything I ever knew about painting. But, I am getting better at it and the results are a painting that I can like better.

More tomorrow.

More photos

Now that I can access the user portion of my blog I am going to try to catch up with some more photos.

The sand dunes photo is in Death Valley and was taken shortly after sunrise (yes, we got up REALLY early and were treated to wonderful colors as we traveled through the park to get to the sand dunes. I used my digital zoom and multiplier and was quite far away from the dunes, but with my braces and sore feet didn't want to traverse the dunes to get a good shot. The dunes photos with the multiplier lens makes it look like I had hiked out close to the dunes.

The pool with algae was at the Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge. This is one of the few places on the planet where the Pupfish have endured, though they are on the protected, almost extinct list. They are only about 1-1 1/2 inches in length and an almost electric blue color, darting among the algae. The pools are spring fed and crystal clear. The reason the pool looks a bit murky in this photo is that my camera was focusing on the fish and blurred the background, plus it was a deep pool with clear water on top. Really was a surprise to see these pools amidst the desolate landscape surrounding Death Valley.

The third photo of the rock shows just a few of the contrasts in rock colors in DV. It was unbelievable how many colors there were at different times of the day. This really is a surprising place to visit.

Now, on to Zion!

Death Valley

I have been unable to submit anything to my blog since we left on our trip since Internet Explorer would not allow that. Tom has Mozilla Foxfire on his laptop so we tried it through that and it worked. These are two of the many photos I have taken in Death Valley and surrounding areas in the past week. Tomorrow morning we leave for Zion and my Carl Purcell workshop there.

We're having a fun and relaxing time, enjoying our first road trip in over three months. Death Valley is such an interesting place. We have been there during sunrise, sunset and sundown and all the times in between. The colors of the rocks change magically according to the time of the day. The photo of the rocks is at Artist's Palette, which is aptly name due to the different rock colors. The other photo is of a sundown trip we took through the park.

More later as I process more photos.

Arts and Craft Fair, March 3

A fellow art club member stopped by my table and took my photo at a recent art sale. My next sale will be April 7 & 8 at the Sun City Grand Art Club.

Love this Grandma stuff!

No artwork to show today, just a quick photo to show my favorite baby...she is here for a short visit (she brought her parents, too) and I am loving getting to play with her. She still doesn't allow anyone but Mommy and Daddy to hold her, but she lets Grandma play with her and she gives good kisses! She is a real cutie now at 12 months, runs all over the place.

Petroglyph tiles

These are petroglyph "tiles", actually 4x4 and 5x7 pieces of textured clayboard for watercolor that I was asked about, so I will submit them here. I paint the background rock colors (usually three glazes) and then, when the last glaze is dry, I lift out the petroglyph shapes. I use any of my hundreds of photos I have of these things and try to stay as accurate as possible to the figures and shapes carved out of stone as they were done by the Ancients. I then "enhance" them a bit with some added black lines here and there, spray them with clayboard fixative and put them on the appropriate size display easel or table stand. I sell quite a few of them, stand included, and they have become quite popular. I thought originally I would mostly make the 4x4's, but people at my sales have been asking for specific figures to be done on 5x7's and 8x10's. These could also be framed, without glass, since they are sealed but I think they are nice to sit on a shelf or table since everyone is so limited on wall space for art, it seems. Someone asked me about using the smallest ones as coasters and since they are sealed that might work. However, I would not guarantee that since I haven't tried it and my original intent in creating them was for display.

Go Diamondbacks

This little angel will be here until Monday. Just look at all that red hair that Aubrey is growing, finally! She has the stance, though, of a sumo wrestler in pink. They are due to arrive tomorrow afternoon....yea!

We leave for a two-week trip next week, I will try to enter scenes from our stops along the way, including my workshop with Carl Purcell in Zion. Since I switched my blog over to the "new" blogger, hopefully I can enter things from remote computers more easily than before.