Blue Bowl of Happiness

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I mentioned before that I've been listening to podcasts lately while I'm painting. What's funny is that now when I look back at them, I remember whatever I was hearing. For this one I heard a Moth podcast about a lady with cancer who was trying to decide between wearing a scarf or a wig. It was more interesting than that sounds. Anyway, what a thing to hear when I'm painting these bald little things.

Hungry, Hungry ... Pigs

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I didn't have any hippos. Honestly that would have made the title perfect. But there you are. You can't have everything.

BTW, I'm feeling better! Thank you all for your kind wishes. : )

Egg Island

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I've been suffering from a miserable cold the last couple of days. I hope as many of you as possible have managed to dodge it, though I hear it's going around. Ugh.

Egg-a-licious

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The eggs I usually buy are brown. Not that they aren't pretty, but I decided to buy myself a carton of white eggs just for painting. Here's the first one. My goal with this one was to see how few strokes I could paint the eggs with and still have them read as eggs. It was harder than it looks I think. You can expect more egg paintings.

A Remembered Walk

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The last place we lived in Texas was in a forest. We loved to take walks in our neighborhood, which basically looked like this. The trees were mostly Blackjack Oak and Loblolly Pine. It was very unique for Texas, and despite it being very hot for half the year, we loved it. Unfortunately this is the very forest that burned down three years ago, along with our house. I am told there is only a small part of the forest left. It's very sad. I did this from a photo.

Colorful House

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Winter in Eugene means lots of overcast days and a fair amount of rain. I like it because I can hunker down in my studio, get cozy, and paint. I've been doing lots of that, but have recently been experiencing some cabin-fever for the first time in a while. So when the sun came out the other day, I headed out with my camera. One of the places I found was this quite colorful house. Honestly, I wouldn't have chosen these colors myself, but I love it in the painting!

Tippy Top Garage

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Recently I was interviewed by Antrese Wood the Savvy Painter gal, here. If you haven't discovered her yet, she's got loads of other interesting interviews to listen to in case mine is boring. : ) No, really. Meanwhile, here's a simple car parked in part shadow on the top floor of a parking garage somewhere in San Francisco.

Escape Door

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One of the reasons I decided to take this year off from teaching, is so I can experiment with my work. I haven't posted everything I've done, because some of it has gone down in flames of ... bad. But one thing I've decided to do is paint from photos I've passed over before, but are in my files nonetheless. This is one of those, from an excursion to Santa Cruz, CA. A simple alley in town, complete with matching bike. It's subdued, but I like this one.

Stepping Out

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I used two lights again on this one. I also played around with the broad expanses of color - adding little bits of other colors to spice them up. This is something I used to do all the time and then forgot about.

Microfashion

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I completely stole the title for this from Humans of NY, which I see on Instagram (so cool, if you haven't seen it!). The shoes I found at the thrift store the other day. I've been keeping my eyes peeled for some just like this for a long, long time.

Oh, and I shone (shined?) two lights on the shoes - a warm one and a cool one. It made for some interesting shadows. I tried this once before but didn't like it. I'm glad I gave it another shot. I don't think I'll do it for every still life, but I will certainly try it in the future if I think it might work. FYI - I used a florescent for the cool, and halogen flood for the warm.

Poised

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In answer to the question I posed in yesterday's post - it was the evenly exiting plate. Normally, if I'm cropping something like that, I shoot for uneven - so that each of the sides that are cropped are different lengths. But I got lots of emails/messages pointing out other broken rules that I hadn't even noticed! Which is humbling. And I could always use a bit of that. So, thank you! : )

For this painting (above) I used a softer light than normal. I'm in love with the colors.

Divided Attention

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I broke a rule with this one. Anyone who has taken my workshop will spot it immediately. And I will give the same excuse they give me in class - the plate changed as I was painting it! Can you spot it?

Attention, Places!

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This was a fun one.

My Collection

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This one doesn't have any wild color ... well, any wild color that wasn't actually THERE anyway. But I'm really happy with it anyway. I find that it doesn't come naturally to me to change the colors. It's not an instinct. I have to TRY to change them, and often I get to the end of a painting, having fully intended to experiment, and everything is the same. I'm pondering the implications.

Convening on Blue

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Since yesterday's worked out so well, I thought I'd give it another go (uhh, before yesterday's got so popular). To be safe I stuck with the same relative composition and colors, and exaggerated some but a little less. I'll let you be the judge, but I will definitely be playing around with this concept more.

Meanwhile, I've become completely obsessed with figure drawing. I went to another session tonight - a smaller one with better light. Here are the last 2 poses - I think 20 and 25 minutes.

A Little Extra Color

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Before you say, "what the ... ?" let me explain the insanity of this painting. I was working on an ArtByte about white, and I wanted to show how exaggerating the colors TOO much wouldn't work. But it did! Or at least I think so. It was quite a surprise for me how much I liked this what-not-to-do painting, actually! I think the key was definitely being true to the values. So I tailored my ArtByte a little and life went on. Lesson learned. And a good one at that.

In the Trees

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This is another one of my friend Pam. I just loved the glowing green of the trees outside this second floor bedroom. I have fiddled with the image for days. In the end I couldn't get it to look as good as it does in person. Alas.

Fashion Awaits You

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This is another one from NYC, and one of my favorites so far. It all just came together like magic. It's 8x8in., so a little bigger than normal.

I spent 3 hours this morning at a figure drawing session, with no pose longer than 25 minutes. It was heaven! The time flew by. I've been meaning to go forever, and I finally just told myself to do it. I hope to make it a regular thing.

Orange Invasion

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Here's a slightly bigger painting of small oranges invading the dishware. I always said those oranges were sneaky.

Just to let you know, I am working on some new ArtBytes. One of them has to do specifically with white! I'm also doing some demo videos of subjects that have been requested. I'll have them (& books!) ready in the next few weeks.

View From the Train

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When I was in NYC last spring, I stayed with my good friend, Lois, and every morning we took the train into the city from her house. Along with views of the NYC skyline, we had lots of peeks into neighborhoods and more industrial areas, like this. It was morning, so the shadows were long and blue and poifect. No, it wasn't very social of me to take pictures rather than talk to my friend, but as a fellow artist, she understood.