Life Drawing Fun!

Every Thursday morning this summer I have been enjoying life drawing. I use oil pastels on brown paper from Home Depot's paint department. It comes on big rolls and I cut off a bunch of random pieces before I go. Here are some samples. You can see crazy color is my favorite!

Portrait Assignment

I had an assignment to paint my husband's grandkids, Estella and Andrew. (I am much too young to be a grandmother to his son's children! Ha!) Anyway, working from a photo I did this acrylic 16x20. It went fairly smooth. Now that I am not working a day job I can paint into the late night and get things done faster.

The Job That Wasn't For Me

Well last week I had the fastest job ever. I quit before I started! I was hired to do painting workshops in art stores for a paint manufacturer. Sounded like a pretty cool part time gig. Then the "curriculum" came they wanted me to teach. It was scripted copy cat paintings that the students were to paint along on little 9x12" canvas boards. This was wrong for so many reasons I can't list them here. I quickly emailed my resignation...yikes that was a close call!
Meanwhile Life Drawing continues to be a real high point to my week. I'd better finish getting my studio cleaned up so I can get to painting soon.

Paintings from Lake Pleasant

This is a series of paintings of the area around Lake Pleasant. They hung in the reception for my niece Ingrid and Adam's wedding which overlooked the lake.

New web site

I am excited to have a new website thanks to my daughter. She gave me a year of hosting for my birthday and set up the first bits on the site. It is really nice. My old hosting company doubled in price and I had let the site sit unloved for awhile. I am excited by the new look and will do some tweaking to get it just right. Meanwhile it is an improvement for sure!

Where did time go?

This is the first post in over a year. Where did time go? I lost months in the blur of my last years of school and working as a volunteer exhibit coordinator. Those jobs overwhelmed my time and left me neglecting this other world. My work may have suffered as a result, but I hope not. I hope I have been learning things which will flow out as I begin to really work in earnest, full time as an artist. I have one quarter to go in school and then I hope an amazing period of work will begin. I plan to use oils for the first time in over a decade. A weekend workshop using them plein aire is the spark for that. The adventure is almost ready to begin...

Home made charcoal

Last evening I made some homemade vine charcoal. It was so easy I am amazed that they sell vine charcoal for the amount of money that they charge. I wondered around the backyard collecting twigs and sticks of all sorts. They ended up being from the sisso tree, the Brazilian pepper tree and even some lantana.I wrapped them all together in two layers of aluminum foil. This got thrown in the fire pit with a bit of wood and some newspapers to get it going. After about 25 minutes I took it out and opened the package. It had sticky dark tar like residue on the inside layer and then lots of nice soft vines of charcoal! All just as easy as that! Today I walked the dog and picked up more sticks at the park. This could be habit forming!