Here, Chickie Chickie Chickie

Chorus Girls, 10 x 20" oil on canvas, for the Black & White Show at Maple Grove ArtsCenter. Available, $195. 

 

My source photo, above. I found it fit a 1:2 format perfectly, and I had a 10 x 20" canvas on hand, so we were off to the races. First step, get the drawing established. Below, the drawing in brown pastel pencil, which is easy to erase or paint over. Regular graphite pencil is NOT, so I don't use it when I paint.

I don't often outline forms before I paint them. This time, I wanted a little bit of a graphic flavor to the painting, so I used a liner brush to establish my drawing before I began blocking in the light and shadow.

Much as I loved the tractor wheels in the source photo, I really couldn't use them in the painting. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice things you love a lot, in order to get what you love the most. In this picture, I loved the sense of movement and rhythm of the hens and I'd have lost that if I'd junked up the background, so the tractor had to go.

Oil paints usually work best if you start with the shadows and then add more and more light, so that's what I did here. Overall this is very thin paint, and will be dry to the touch in a couple days.

The Big Mare, Finished

This was, more than anything else, an exercise in knowing when to hit the brakes. I love color and contrast so much ...

One of my college professors taught us about Martini Syndrome, which is what happens when you're painting and you do a little bit of something and it. Looks. Amazing. And so you figure, if a little is that good, you need a LOT MORE. And then it turns out, no, you really, really didn't. 

Art on the Easel ... and on the Floor.

This is a pretty large canvas, 40" h x 30" w.  Based on a snapshot of my Twilight looking rather elegant, short-legged Percheron that she is.  These three shots show the progression from first stages of sketching and very thin washes of solvent/oil paint, to working out some of the "background" composition.

Above, what the painting looks like as I type this post. I've got a good sense of solid form and some depth happening, and from here on out the challenge will be to finish the piece without overworking and killing it. I like the looseness and want to keep that.

Meanwhile, on the floor beside the easel, I've got a composition laid out for a salvage piece in black and white. I have to paint some of these elements, assemble them all, and then create other pieces to add. This is feeling more and more like part of the Crows series, so expect there to be black birds involved.

Black Dog

Portrait of Zeke, 8 x 10" mixed media on cotton paper. This is a commissioned birthday gift for his person -- so I finished it a few days ago but couldn't post it yet.

I like black animals; my own horse is black. They're challenging to draw and paint, though!

I lucked out with Zeke: the person who commissioned the portrait had two excellent photos of him for me to work from. That's often not the case -- and there's often nothing to be done about it, because so many of the portraits I do are memorials of animals who are now gone.

I've said this before, but get photos of your creatures now; you'll want them, and wish you had taken them, if you don't. In this age of digital photography, we really no longer have excuses. It's not as though we'll be wasting expensive film.

Tribute to a Sweet Sheltie

Portrait of Lady, 11 x 11" mixed media on cotton paper. This elegant little girl passed away earlier this year, and I had the honor of capturing her from a few photos her owners had.

Horse, Flowers, Owl -- Days 5 though 9

 

 Cocoa in Motion, about 3.5 x 8", for Day 5. Day 6 I chose to create something less tangible -- a new game with my own horse; Day 7, I went walking and came home with Stolen Lilacs, below.

Day 8 was probably technically Day 9, and is titled Sleepless in the Kitchen. A portrait of my little owl kitchen timer, done at *mumble* last night while I was entirely too awake.  This and the Lilacs are in the same small book, about 6.5 x 6".

Fear is Unrelated to Ability

So I signed on to do the 30 Days of Creativity Challenge.  What you're seeing here are days 1 through 4.

 You'd think, for someone who makes art for a living, pledging to create something every day for 30 days straight would be a breeze. And you'd be mistaken. But, you say, amateurs and students have to fight with distractions, self-doubts, and fears! We struggle with the feeling that all the other times we got it right, were flukes somehow, and this time it's going to suck. 

 

 ...and that is basically what I go through almost every time I pick up a brush or even try to decide what I'm going to do next. 

 

Promising to create daily means I have to do something even (especially) when I do not wanna. And the "don't wanna" almost always turns out to be fear. Sometimes I'm just tired, but mostly, nah, fear.

So far this is what I have. Four small things, each of which was an uphill battle just to get started. Keko, the horse at top, was moving around; I'd never drawn a bird's nest, let alone in watercolor, and it was so complex and subtle; my inner censor screamed at me for the black horse silhouette because "isn't this cheesy" and all kinds of accusations; the pond edge was a complicated jumble of rocks and grass and how on earth would I make that look okay?

 Almost everything I do is that way. If you're learning any kind of creative endeavor and you think that you must not be very good or have much potential, because you still find it scary to try, just know that nope, your ability and your fear are unrelated. 

Wisconsin in May

My little sketchbook went with me, and my watercolor set. This was a hiking trail I was on; I stopped and sketched the scene in terra-cotta colored pastel pencil, then added watercolor back at the lodge.

Shortly after making this sketch, I saw a Scarlet Tanager for the first time; shortly after that, I discovered that the trail signs became progressively fewer and less helpful the longer I walked, and that I was ... not lost, exactly, but making an unplanned detour in the heat of the day.

Also there were bloodsucking bugs out. I will spare you the details.

The walk was still worth doing, though.

"Wait, Come Back!" (Portrait of Blue)

 

 

Blue is a mostly-Arabian gelding who's one of the herd where my mare lives. He's a bright, sensible fellow with one of the most endearing quirks I've ever seen: When he wants his person to stick around, play with him or just hang out and pay attention to him, this is how he asks. The turned head and the one front foot picked up daintily.

It's so characteristic that I was asked to use it for a portrait, so we got some snapshots and this is the result.  I couldn't be happier; I love adding something so unusual -- and so charming -- to my portfolio.

Goldfish at FK Art Glass, Minneapolis

Both 6 x 9", sketched last night at FK Art Glass during Art-A-Whirl. The studio is a charming old house and one room includes a tub full of fish, which provided the model for this pair of sketches.

These are available unframed at $45 each.