Forsythia

Last spring the forsythia was beautiful. I painted three paintings of it before it faded, and I listened to Glen Gould playing Schoenberg over and over while I painted.

This winter I'm listening to John Adams while I paint - usually just once or twice a day. (There are two parts to The Dharma at Big Sur, but I've only linked to Part 1.)
In December I got out the third painting shown above, and I decided it was very green. I repainted it listening to The Dharma. So much texture in painting is new to me. The whole painting seems more decided by the music than by me.

Three Trees

The results of this painting kind of take me by surprise - the style is looser than anything I've ever done for a landscape.
I've listed it on etsy. Cat not included.

Elephants - New Listings

I've listed three new elephant paintings in my etsy shop. The two above I showed here as I was working on them; I painted further on the second painting after that post.



This painting is based on this 2010 sketch of the elephants at the Toledo Zoo.

Bianca

Happy New Year!
This morning I felt like I'd finally arrived in 2012 ... I guess I'm on a different, slower schedule...maybe aiming for the Chinese New Year...eventually.




This past week I had an idea that doing life drawings in charcoal hadn't served me very well. Charcoal pencils make much darker life drawings than graphite, but I didn't feel like I had as much control, or could take the time to get all the gradations in values that would make them beautiful. I found a bunch of examples that confirmed these thoughts and had planned to post them last week, but I couldn't bring myself to.
Then today I dug through stacks of pastels and I found these. Maybe September 2010 was a good month for life drawing or maybe it's the paper or maybe I was getting in lots of sessions (the most probable reason), but I ended up thinking that charcoal was o.k.

Revisited

Once my orangutan painting was stretched on bars and hanging over the sofa I didn't like the colors as much. I went back in with orange and got rid of all of the burnt sienna.

I also added more dark browns in the lower half and golds at the top of the gorilla painting - before it was stretched and on the wall and too high to reach.

Euonymus

I have been doing lots of sketches of the branching patterns of trees and shrubs. This - in micron pen - is a burning bush.

I painted this of the same shrub. I didn't reference my sketch; I painted from life. Sketching helps me understand what I'm seeing and reduce the number of lines I feel I need to convey what I see.