Finished at last

I'm not a speedy painter, and I tend to rework things until they are where I want them to be, so it is with happy relief that I finished this in time to give it a gel medium protective coat and a final UV spray before the weather was too cold. (I always spray outside because of the chemicals.) If you want to see what it looked like at first (which was absolutely awful!) click on this link.

Tara

I'll be working on more portraits of the human and pencil variety from here on in, although there's a painting I'd like to try.

Hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving!

More secrets and art projects

Still more holiday secret projects which I cannot post in the works, 

so in the mean time, I'll post some of the images from our art class projects. 

We've been taking a lot of class ideas from Carla Sonheim's 'Drawing Lab' lately. For this project we enlarged quick marker sketches 250 percentand then used doodles of complementary colors to fill the shapes. (Also we used metallic markers. Kids LOVE metallic markers.)

One student working on her Picasso dog/cat
(also from Carla Sonheim's 'Drawing Lab').

This was my Picasso dog. It ended up looking more like
a Picasso pig, but I was okay with that.

My eldest daughter after two rigorous art class sessions.
We had to administer doses of chocolate to revive her. 

This class is almost entirely boys.
It makes for an interesting afternoon.

The later class has been making linocuts.
We're going to print this week.

This will be our project for the first group this week, partially courtesy of Carla Sonheim. (Her idea was to do a picture in the style of Dr. Seuss.) I like the idea of turning art into toys with moving parts, so I decided we could make it into a three dimensional pop-up scene with three layers of play potential. We'll see how it goes when they try it out on Friday. 

Progress

Haven't been able to work on this for awhile, but there is a little progress since last time.

Happy autumn!

: )

Celebration of leaves

I'm posting this drawing (a secret no longer) to celebrate the fact that we have finally cleared our yard of an estimated 23 to 24 million leaves. (We have a lot of large oak trees.) The yard looks beautiful!

Author Laura Hillenbrand to the rescue!

Thanks to the book club, of which I am a sporadic member, I've had opportunity to work lately accompanied by the fantastic writing of Laura Hillenbrand, author of Unbroken. Her book tells an amazing true World War II survival story that you won't find (unfortunately) in any of today's history books. Definitely a must-read.

The happy upshot is that while listening to Ms. Hillenbrand's book, I've been able to finish two portraits and start another. Although the first two are top secret, I can share some of my progress on the third, which shows a big brother tenderly cuddling his new little brother, recently arrived.

Sh! It's a secret

The only problem with this time of year is that there are so many secrets floating around that you have to be careful. Unfortunately, the next series of portraits that I'm working on are top secret, and although the internet is such a vast arena that it's unlikely someone might stumble across something they weren't supposed to see, it is possible.

So for now, I won't be posting my art until I have something that isn't a secret being kept from someone.

Happy fall! : )

A weekend's work

On Saturday I made a commitment to put in some solid work time with art. Not easy although I was up by 6 A.M. By 9:30 I had done lots of work, but no art work. Finally got going, though, and I was happy with the result.