Quick Update

I am sure some of you are starting to wonder if I have chucked all my paints and pens in a drawer and locked it tight. I assure you I have not. Those of you that have been with me the past 9 months of blogging know that I care for my 98 year old Grandmother. She seems to have started into a fairly steep decline and I don't believe that we will have her much longer. At this point, I am having trouble staying focused long enough to get anything down on paper. I know the situation will change soon and am looking forward to, once again, being able to not only focus to paint at home but have the free time to paint in the field. Happy New Year to all of you and thank you for all of you encouragement and support this past year.

Testing new paints

Just loaded MY paints into my travel paint set. I haven't used it much because I didn't like the student quality paints in it once I got used to my artist paints. At lunch today I was just playing around trying out the paints and my water brush. I added the background after I got home tonight. I am very pleased with both the paints and the water brush.

Cow with an attitude

This is a close up of the face of the cow from a couple of days ago... Since I don't draw often in just pencil and it is recognizable, I am pleased with it. I did end up darkening it quite a bit in photo shop so that it would show up better on my blog. I can see some areas that I could critique but I'll leave that to the viewer...

Path in the afternoon sunlight

Paths that wander off into the unknown intrigue me, as do Small, winding side roads. This one was no exception. I painted this from a photo I took on the same afternoon outing as the "purple cow" painting from Tuesday. I am still learning about capturing sunlight and shadows but progress is there (as long as I put brush to paper).

Bad Hair Day

What happens when you don't paint for a while? You end up painting purple cows having bad hair days.

I actually, wanted to work with tones rather than just black, brown and grey so I started layering on washes. I like the way she can out however, I couldn't quite capture the look in her eyes. I may try doing a close up of her face later on. One of the things I find, when I settle in and paint a subject, is all the little details that I would normally miss like, cows too, have bad hair days!

Fork in the path

Life is at best, unpredictable. The path can be clear and smooth for miles and all of a sudden come to a split. The problem with forks in the path is that you never can seem to see very far up either trail so it all becomes a game of chance. I think how we come to terms with the forks and how true we choose to stay to ourselves influences how difficult the paths are to navigate.

This is the first painting in which I used one color for the background and then built up the foreground on top of it. I like the way it turned out.

Watercolor in Raffine sketchbook.