Mid Summer Dreams

It's the middle of summer and I'm getting ready for my Montana vacation next week (yay!) Well, mentally ready I guess.

Nothing says summer like bugs sitting on daisies!

I took this photo when Jason and I visited upstate New York. I believe we were in a town called Roseboom (love that!). I took my camera out and captured a couple of images of that peaceful place. I still use a 35mm camera and it's so freakin' heavy to carry around and I'm sans lens cap right now. You'd think I'd run out and get another, but it's not that easy! I'm starting to have a difficult time finding film! But it's funny because when I do get my pictures developed and show them to some people, more than one person has told me that they miss looking at photos this way. What a difference to hold a photo or look at it on photo paper vs. someones digital camera. Now, I know some of you out there have some rockin' monitors - but do you miss just flipping through an actual stack of pictures? Or a photo album?

Boardwalk on the Marsh Trail Parker River Reservation

Newburyport MA

This is one of my favorite spots to bird watch. Lots of different species of waterfowl as well as songbirds congregate here and make a racket! I was here on the day that they finally "capped" the well in the Gulf of Mexico. And it makes me think that I should keeping a record of what these places look like to me when I am here. I mean, we can all admit that humans have continuously altered this planet we're on. And there's no way that New England looks like it did 100 years ago. (which was a farm land - stripped!) or 200 hundred years ago.

Still life with Skull, Bottles and Vegetables

Watercolor 8x10

Another still life with the skull. T and I did Wednesday night creativity last night and I thought that we should revisit the skull. I think that I need to spend more time on these paintings. I don't know if I'm thrilled with this one. Again, the bottle in back is glass, the one in front is a ceramic but could you tell the difference? My issue is texture and still trying to work with it. I think next time I'm going to do a still life with only glass. Superstar challenge. And that I can't use what we're having for dinner as the still life. Get some pizzas and make it easy.

Next week I'll be in Montana!! On a dude(ette) ranch http://www.bonanzacreekcountry.com/ woo hoo! I plan to take a ton of pictures with my heavy 35mm and bring a sketch book! I'm so excited!!!

Thursday!

This past week I joined CAG Canine Art Guild and as I have mentioned in my tweets, I'm already seeing benefits from this. It is a wonderful group of artists who are sharing their experiences with galleries, contests, making DVDs and all sorts of things. They also have their own contests, and this month was about cats! Little do they know that I'm truly a cat person (who really likes dogs) and have as many cat paintings as I do dog paintings, so this was just right for me :) More information about the CAG can be found here: http://www.canineartguild.com/ They don't have an avatar up for me yet, but I've been told that it's going up today. Hopefully this will bring more and more recognition to my work. yay!

" French Bully"

5x7" watercolor

"Allston Roof Tops"
8x10" watercolor (done PleinAir)

Last night I hosted the Wednesday night creativity and it was HOT here in Allston-town. I live in a 3 floor walk up, and we're on the top floor. Of course, J & I call it the penthouse :) But since heat rises it felt like an attic in there yesterday. So instead of doing a still life, I decided to paint off the porch. If you look straight out, there's the Boston Skyline. However, it's much more pretty at night, so I decided to look to my left to paint the Allston rooftops. My porch is also a current home to 2 house sparrow families and they were making such a freakin' racket.

This weekend T, A & I are heading up to Vermont for the Vermont Open Studios. This is the first year that I've done it, but T has gone up there for the past 3 years to do it and says it's wonderful. It's a 3 + hour drive so we're leaving Friday night when the Boston traffic dies down in order to get at least 2 full days in. And we'll be visiting the wonderful @a12eggs (twitter handle) for some lovely baked items. I'm secretly hoping for congo bars! YUM :) Here's their site.. http://adozeneggs.com/ HA! I just went to the site to get the correct URL and they have peanut butter cupcakes.... OH I can't wait to taste these!!!

Wednesday Night Creativity

Seriously, Do you realize how HARD it is to paint baby faces???!@?!?!?!


This is a portrait of Kai, my nephew (who is now 7! BTW). Of course this is only a beginning but it's really really difficult to make that baby face really look like a baby face. I'm working from a photo of Kai when he was like lil' over a year. Anyway, the skin color is always a challenge and the mouth is a drool factory .. tough to convey in a portrait. But his eyes are that huge and blue, so that part is easy. I'm thinking lots of pink and burnt sienna for the skin color. I'll keep you in the loop of how this turns out.

And yes, that's my license and keys in the corner. Went out last night for dinner to the Common Ground in Allston to watch the Bruins loose (BOOO!). My constant GoTo bar/restaurant really disappointed me last night. They have changed the menu and have taken off practically every vegetable and all of my favorite dishes. And what we did have certainly wasn't worth the price we paid. Oh CG, Why have you forsaken me!?!?

Wednesday Night Creativity

So this Wednesday Night Creativity has really caught on with me and I love it! Last night, I went to T's house. While her Significant Other, T, was smokin' ribs on the porch, we did a still life that consisted of oranges, bowl of limes, a coconut, a bottle and lilacs in a vase. This is my first attempt at the still life:



This was done with charcoal that I've been holding onto since art school. (I swear, I don't throw anything away). I don't think I succeeded in trying to make that orange half look real juicy and shiny. Which is the challenge for me and what I'm aiming to achieve with these still life projects. I also haven't used charcoal in some time. But it's also nice to break away from what you are normally used to (in my case: watercolors). J said that he really liked how I worked the values.

Then I did it in color:

(this picture was taken at my desk at work this morning as my phone had no juice last night). This was created with Prismacolors. I didn't have a complete spectrum of colors in pencil form, I tried to kick those colors up a notch with a lot of layering.

What's funny is that years ago I started doing a lot of my work just with the prismacolors. Dry, no mess, no fumes.... but they weren't rich enough in color for me unless you had hours to spend coloring and constantly sharpening your pencil. Someone had suggested that I put a watercolor layer down first as that would give almost like a head start in getting that true color saturation. And I did, and then 2 layers and then 3 and then I just started doing more watercolors than anything else. So this piece is like almost a throwback into time. I could have spent more time on those lilacs, but there were so many.... and then dinner was ready :)

We had ribs, chicken, collard greens and cole slaw. OH SO GOOOD and then Chocolate Bread Pudding for dessert. YUM..... - More cardio at the gym this week.

Wednesday Night Creativity at the Allston SkyBox

So the last time I was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, T & I did the live model drawings. We scooted out at about 8ish and checked out this guy's paintings:

Luis Melendez "Still Life with Figs" c. 1760

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Egidio_Mel%C3%A9ndez

Look at the detail!! In all my years paintings I often have trouble with textures. (except fur - that I've got down!) So we decided to do our own still life and practice on textures. J had found a deer skull in the woods a couple of weeks ago (most likely the result of deer hit by car, goes off into woods, coyotes came and finished the job).

So here's our still life. Complete with red grapes, artisan bread and a bottle of wine. (Maynard from Tool created this wine and it is tasty! I still have a bottle and am saving it for a very special occasion). Anyway... I thought it was so pretty and artsy with the skull and all that I took a couple of pictures with the phone and the "good" camera. Our goal was light and texture!

This is my watercolor. I tried to put down as much information as I could before dinner was done (there's nothing like painting whilst the aroma of roasted chicken fills the air). I like the bread and I really like how the shadows came out. It's not done, but yet I think there's a lot to be said for leaving it as is. I don't know. I'm kind of torn about it. Maybe I'll go back, but it's going to be hard because I didn't take any reference photos from this angle and yeah, we ate that bread with the chicken!

Another Wednesday Night at the MFA

Here are some sketches from last night. This model was a spitting image of a Renaissance Madonna. She also held poses for 20 & 15 minutes. I don't like the face on the above drawing. I think she looks too spooked. Like a deer in headlights.....

This one I liked better because of the position, and I think I was pretty successful at getting her proportions right (you can see that I drew the leg where it ought to be in order to get that calf part of the leg correct.) Then T & I went to the Squealin' Pig over in Brigham's Circle on a recommendation from @hiddenboston via Twitter. The food was good, although Tracy said her Reuben could have used more sauerkraut and they were having their Stomp Trivia night and we had the MC's speaker right next to us. So each time he asked a question we had to stop talking ourselves because it was impossible to hear anything.

So I got home about 10:30pm and J was playing guitar. I came in and sat down and started chatting. We were on the sofa and he took his guitar off his lap and placed it between us. Usually I'll just start randomly strumming it to the point of annoyance but this time J worked my fingers into an A Minor and I strummed that for a while. Then me, (of course like a little tot) "Teach me another!!" and then showed me and my fingers a G chord. So I worked on both switching back and forth. Someday............

I'll be rockin' it like PJ Harvey LOL!!!

This weekend I'm going to Hingham to drop off those 2 pieces for the calendar show and making Guiness Cupcakes. I've never done this before, so it could end up to be a total disaster. But I hope not as I've already purchased my edible gold dust for decorating!!