Moving along

At last, after weekends of so much happening personally that my time was simply not my own, I'm back on track. Whew! This poor horse finally has some eyes. : )

Are you wondering?

Probably no one is as bothered as I am that I started a painting and didn't finishing it yet. Still, I thought I should mention that right after I started it, life stepped in and got very busy. I had to do some corrections/additions to a manual for our church (tight deadline), school started (I'm the teacher), and my father-in-law passed away after a very full 94 years (on Tuesday).

So I'm just trying to point out that I'm not procrastinating, but have been running on a crazy schedule that just bops from one major issue to another. Fair warning. I should be back to work on the painting this week.

The end is better than the beginning

My paintings always start out looking awful. It's one of the hardest things I've had to get used to, because pencil drawings and pen and ink pictures don't work that way. They kind of emerge from the paper, almost intact as I work left to right. Not so with paint. As proof, I'm going to give you blow-by-blow visuals this week of a horse portrait I'm working on.

Right now it looks like a paint-by-number gone horribly awry. This is when I can barely stand looking at it myself. I try to get through this stage of laying down the first areas of color quickly, because I'm hoping that I'll like it better as it looks more like the end painting I envision and less like spilled paint. (This is also the stage I think of as the humiliation stage. It's when people who happen to see your painting might ask, "What is it?" Don't laugh. It happens.)

After this I lay down more layers of acrylic over my base colors. At this point I'll add some white to my colors to give them more opacity. Little by little, it's beginning to look like a horse. (Yes!) There are lots of parts of this painting that I'm not satisfied with at this point, but I'm losing the light in my studio, so we'll see what we can do to this tomorrow.

Here's the link to the final image. (Boy, was I glad when it turned out better than the above. the color of this horse's coat was difficult for me, since the reference photos didn't agree with each other.)

Final work

And it's done. I'm looking through photos to choose my next image while I work on a painting which was won at a black tie auction for the Valeo Academy.

Progression

Sometimes it's fun to see the progression of a picture as it's being drawn. Here's my latest project. I find that the more of these pencil portraits that I do, the longer each one takes. As soon as it's completely finished, I'm going to switch back to 8 x 10 and do a painting before moving on with more pencil work.

Just draw it

I like the alien best so far.

When I was young, my dream was to be a cartoonist. I did not become a cartoonist, but I do like to play around with them every so often. Lately I've been experimenting with a strip that I'm creating to add to letters to my daughter while she's in basic training this fall.

I thought I'd share a few of the preliminary sketches. I love the alien, and the family members are okay, but I'm having real trouble coming up with a look for the main character that I actually like.

From the land before mom

Pen and ink: Hus

Lithography: The child

Watercolor: Mom and daughter

Pen and ink: Little mouse

Pen and ink: Rabbit in the snow

Pen and ink: Raccoon on the tree

Pen and ink: White wolves

Okay, technically these were all done before I was a mom. I found them in storage when our dehumidifier malfunctioned, spreading watery not-so-goodness across the basement carpeting. I'd forgotten all about them (twenty+ years will do that to you), and when I unpacked them because the corner of the storage box was wet, this is what I found. Fortunately, I had put them all in plastic, so they were fine.

Anyway, I enjoyed looking back at them. Hope you do, too.