A Painting A Day

Poor little roses are at the end of their life - this is probably the last painting I will get from them. ;)

Changed the angle and the background on the roses
Also painted this one during the day so had strong side light coming through the window
This is an 11 x 14

I have taken quite the hiatus from painting. But I guess if you love something you will always come back to it.
I started easing back into it by starting an online course with Dennis Perrin on painting the flower portrait. The past couple of days I've painted some rather past their prime pink roses in a blue mason jar.
This is day one - "Having a Ball" will post day two next.

I haven't had time to paint, and our local art league has a show this month, so the day before the deadline, I rush to my easel and paint this picture from a lovely photograph I have of our children.

My son is about to graduate from high school and then move far, far away for College and my stepdaughter is getting married this fall, so both of them have these incredible life events going on, and they are top of mind, so it was only natural to paint them.

Because I was painting under a deadline, I used a new product called Liquin Impasto. I needed the paint to dry (like the next day) and I wanted to work in oils so I am happy to say it worked beautifully. The painting stayed wet long enough to mix the paint on the canvas, and it was completely dry within a few hours. It also comes in a tube which is really nice - honestly I don't think I used Liquin much before because it was so darn hard to get it out of the bottle.

So this deadline was a good thing - I found a new product that I really like. Because I always seem to paint under pressure, I think I'll be using it a lot!

I'm tired of trying to second guess the art buying public and so decided this weekend to just get back to my roots and paint what I want to paint - which is people.

So did this painting of a boy fishing. It reminds me very much of my brother when he was young. I didn't start it until like 5:30 last night, and I never hooked up my lamp so it was hard to see the colors. I didn't realize how purple the rock was until I looked at it this morning. Maybe I need to work without light more often! Haha - because I love the colors.

This is a large piece - 30x48. I wouldn't have been able to finish it if there had been more detail. I spent a great deal of time on getting the green color right on the lake. I still had the light while working on it. I started off using viridian in the mix but quickly abandoned it and just mixed my own with ultramarine blue, lemon yellow and cad red light.

I actually painted this to go in our living room. We have a very modern living room and the focal point is an old mid century cubist painting, so I wanted to keep with the theme in the room. Since I can't afford any "real" cubist works, I decided to create my own. This one is fairly large - a 36x36. My husband commented that I got a little too carried away with the black lines, and maybe I did - making it look more like stained glass than an abstract. It was surprising difficult to do because I made the mistake of starting with the lines and then had to try to paint inside them. I think if I do another one, I'll do the outlines in pencil and add the black last! I do think I'll try another one because I really like this.

Plein Air Memphis had an outing this morning at the Botanic Gardens and I chose this little spot along the creek with the pretty cherry trees in bloom. But my painting was really awful! I wiped it off when I got home and did a quick do over. The composition is much the same but I tried to simplify and tried to capture the long shadows from the trees. Not really happy with the second attempt either, but it is better than the first. Landscapes continue to be so very challenging for me. It's difficult to process so much information and so many colors.