TO THE HILLS

I painted this dyptic of the hills last summer, but I have it hanging in my office and it's like having a window to the outdoors. It is transparent acrylic on 12 x 12 panels.

Victorian Abstract

I am really enjoying this challenge from Different Strokes from Different Folks. The victorian house was posted by Karin Jurick on her blog for us to use as a reference photo. I first mentally cropped the photo and painted the house, then decided that it was a much more interesting composition to zoom in on the eave line and balance the position the contrasting windows in a square format. Then I intensified the colors. I think I'm going to take this design one step farther and do a more abstract picture using these division lines, but drop out the indication of the architecture. I think I will do it in collage and use textured papers and paint. Stay tuned......

It's a Beau - tiful Dog

A friend of mine asked me to paint a picture of his son's dog, Beau. He's a very regal Chesapeake Bay Retriver. Here's the finished watercolor that he gave to his son for Christmas.

Most of my dog portraits have been on Yupo paper which lets me get a lot of serendipitous texture in the coat, but with Beau I needed to achieve a softer finish so I use transparent watercolor on illustration board.

A RETRO FIT

I haven't had much time to paint this week, but I did pull up some of the previous references photos from Karin Jurick's blog and did some quick, loose studies. They are not near as finished as the pieces submitted to her site, but I just wanted to use these as some warm up practise. I haven't really done many watercolors lately so if I do try a more finished piece, I'll start again and lay down a better drawing first. I was mostly trying to work with tone values and composition, rather than details. There's a new challenge this week, so I'll work on that, as well as on some acrylic abstracts this week.

A Second Chance

I started on the Different Strokes from Different Folks challenge again. This time I used acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12. I added the people to improve the composition and I'm pretty happy with it. This was a tough subject to approach, but the point is to push us out of our comfort zone and use our imagination as well as our paint brushes.

Thanks, Karin Jurick for creating such a great network for us.

A STAB IN THE DARK

Here's my first 3 stabs at the jefferson memorial at night. Part of the DSFDF challenge. I like the zoomed in version the best, but it needs to be more precise, but it is giving me a direction.

LOOKING FORWARD TO A PRODUCTIVE 09

I have just been facinated with all the portraits appearing daily of DSFDF..they are all great, but I am also enjoying the links to the other artist's websites and blogs. You guys are really articulate about your struggles, goals and philosophies. You are inspiring me to become a daily painter, or at least setting a goal to accomplish 2 or 3 a week, anyway. I am also going to add a few of my figuratives here. These are all older works for me, but I hope to publish new works from this point forward.