Monday, February 15, 2016

Pair of Pears
5" x 7", pastel
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One of the areas of painting that I struggle with the most is trying to stay loose in the application of pastels or watercolor. I was looking at my recent still life paintings and noticed that this fact was glaring right at me. Persimmons has a freedom of stroke, loose, interesting. Each subsequent painting became tighter and tighter.

That is not what I was striving for so I set out to remedy that with this painting. Happy with the result

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Untitled
10" x 8", pastel
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Coming up with titles for paintings is tough, especially still life paintings. Animals have names, landscapes can have titles of where the area is, but a still life.......??? So there are mums, apples and pottery in this painting......other than that I've got nothing! Oh, well.

Truly loving painting the subject matter. Bringing back my watercolor days, but so much easier to get the depth of color. Plus, that highlight is the last thing added, not saved from the white of the paper! 

Friday, February 5, 2016

All About Red

All About Red
8" x 8", pastel


Decided to continue on with still life paintings. There is a lot of red, quite the challenge, but I like it! 

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Persimmons

Persimmons
8" x 8", pastel
Click to buy

Early in January, I received an email asking me if I would do a demo for a pastel society meeting, and not a local society. I was floored, and immediately set about listing all the reasons to say no. My family thought I was nuts for not jumping at the chance for the opportunity. After consulting my art mentors, I decided to bite the bullet and give that first ever demo! The kicker was that it is to be a still life demo.

When watercolor was my main medium, still life paintings were my 'go to' subject. The reason being that my teacher, Angie Banta Brown, provided the most wonderful reference photos from which to paint. She was kind enough to help me in that area for this demo. Setting up a still life requires stuff, wonderful, colorful, varied objects to display in an interesting way and Angie has the most amazing props. We had such fun arranging and rearranging all those props. 

Persimmons is my first painting from that day. Decided I had better practice a little, don't think there has been a still life created since 'Caffe' Italiano'. Stay tuned for more still life paintings, as I prepare for the upcoming demo.