Summer Storm - Eastern Kingbird

"As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward."
                                                                                       ~ Vincent van Gogh

Summer Storm - 16" x 12" oil on canvas

I enjoy working on my little almost-daily 5" x 7" and 6" x 6" pieces as I continue to explore oil painting, but sometimes it is so satisfying to jump in the deep end and take on a bigger piece. I've used this bird in other paintings and drawings before, but it keeps inspiring me. It's from a photo I took a few years back at the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge in Stevensville, MT. Eastern kingbirds just say "summer" to me. They were such a common sight on barbed wire fences all over Montana, as were thunderstorms on summer afternoons. It's a nice memory to savor as we're slowly plodding along through February.

Froot Loops Is Finished

12x16 acrylic on canvas board

The DH started calling this painting "Froot Loops". It is not my intention to keep that as the official title of this piece, plus Kelloggs would probably consider it a copyright issue, but for now it's fun. 

After staring at the painting for a week, I did decide to do a tiny little bit more to the background; just little hints of foliage and branches with a palette knife (another first for me). I'm pretty pleased with the results and the painting overall. But my open studio mentors have told me I need to bring even bigger brushes next week...

A picture of my charming model from the Pittsburgh Aviary.

Eye of the Beholder

It's not finished yet! The background is giving me fits. In my last post, the background was very fun almost like a children's book illustration, which I like but was not really what I was aiming for with this painting. I then tried to build those fun splotches of color into more foliage-like forms while still keeping it loose and fun. That was not so successful. The background began to have a disconcerting resemblance to camouflage fabric. So I worked away from the blobs and more towards hints of a habitat in the background. I do love the rich greens and moodiness in its current form, but I had hoped for a bit more...something. More abstract and vibrant? More tropical rainforest? More painterly and fun? It is hard to paint a certain way when you can't even put your finger on what it is you are after!

And this is where the eye of the beholder comes in. If I look at this painting as just a painting, I'm very pleased with it. However, if I look at this painting with my original vision for it, I am very frustrated. I showed this latest work to my husband and he argued against doing anything more to the background. He saw it as a portrait and therefore the background should be nebulous. My studio friends are urging me to work the background more. Then again I've heard many people say that the painting will tell you what to do and in this case, it seems the painting wants to be like this. Maybe I am trying to force it to be something it wasn't meant to be. Or maybe I actually need to keep working at it until I get it right. I'm overthinking this. What's your vote?

Keeping Busy

Life is a funny thing, I've noticed. One minute you're despairing of ever creating a new group of friends or of breaking into the graphic design circles in your new town and the next minute you're swamped with freelance work, friends and opportunities. Not that I'm complaining.

I've found a couple of artists who hold an open studio night once a week and I've been painting with them. It's truly the highlight of my week. Their influence is helping me to continue my efforts to loosen up, not be so detail-oriented, and experiment.

I see that while I've been away, Blogger changed their formatting. I'm sure I'll get used to it but things aren't working very smoothly this first time round. Getting images exactly where I want them in the text is still challenging. What does everyone else think of the new Blogger? 

Work In Progress on another toucan. The eye's not painted yet, so it looks a little freaky. My new mentors are threatening to hide all my small brushes so I'm forced to get over my aversion to the big ones.

Painting 24 - Does It Pop Yet?

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of graphic designers like the phrases "Jazz it up" or "Make it pop" (except maybe a client insisting on text being in comic sans...). Yet as I struggle with this painting, "pop" is exactly how I would describe what I'm trying to accomplish. I should be moving on to Painting 25 but for some reason I can't let this one alone. I guess the vision I have in my head seems so attainable this time. The background is getting better; I can't see my brush strokes anymore. I think possibly the color is getting richer as it gets darker. The egret may even be starting to glow a little. I'd like to add some leaves fading into the background. The big question is how much more abuse can the paper take? I am tempted to start over. The painting is only 6" x 4", so it wouldn't be a huge undertaking to start with fresh white paper again. Then maybe I could attain that elusive "pop" I'm looking for.

However, this will all have to wait to be resolved until tomorrow. I've been up since 4:30 am (not by choice) and I am tired. Meanwhile, Madeleine is letting us know in no uncertain terms that she is going to starve to death in a matter of seconds if she is not fed RIGHT NOW, even though she ate about 4 hours ago. So anyone who is still with me at this point, I bid you bonne nuit.

Painting 19 - Flamingo

I really like this one. It is not at all what I started out to do but I love how it ended up. This was going to be an exercise in careful planning. I was going to have a background, the bird was going to be highly detailed. For once I had every step of the painting planned out ahead of time. But when I put down my first wash of color on the flamingo's neck and saw how it interacted with the paper, I suddenly knew I needed to paint loose with no background and that I needed to not fuss with the painting but just let it be as it was. After 18 paintings, I think I am finally beginning to understand the unique properties of watercolor and how not to fight that but use it to the painting's advantage. This is a very exciting step for me.

I believe my reference photos for this were taken many years ago at either the zoo in Seattle or the zoo in Philadelphia. I don't remember which. But I do remember spending a lot of time watching them preening and fluffing and doing their flamingo thing. Such great, beautiful, awkward birds! Their feathers are not naturally pink - the color comes from carotenoids contained in the algae and little crustaceans that they eat. When the birds live in captivity, such as in a zoo, they need a special diet to keep their coloring or their feathers will become white.

Paintings 16 & 17

With a vacation and some freelance design projects lately, I've been falling a little behind with my painting schedule this month, so I rocked out two paintings yesterday. They both gave me a workout on laying down watercolor washes!


This scenic is from my imagination, but based on Glacier National Park and a trillium I've used in a previous painting. There are parts of the park where the trees are so thick that it is very dark in the understory, but wherever there's a break in the trees above your head, you can see the mountains towering over everything. Oftentimes the mountains are much closer than I show in this painting. They are omnipresent. Glacier is one of my very favorite places anywhere in the world (especially in the off-season when you basically have the park to yourself!).

The feather study was based on a specimen I had stowed in a box of bits and pieces of nature that I keep on hand for inspiration. The fuzzy bits (called the afterfeather apparently) were tricky to create with shadows on a colored background. I wish I could've gotten the feather a bit crisper, but I was doing a fair amount of pulling off color, since I didn't use any masking this time. I don't know what bird the feather is from. I found it in our yard a few years ago. It is a fairly small feather, so I'm thinking maybe it is a chickadee feather. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know what it is!


I also totally cleaned out my studio area yesterday and reorganized everything. Now I have space to paint! It is amazing what a difference that makes. I put up two small decorative "floating" shelves and put some little things I find inspirational on them (including a photograph of Georgia O'Keefe!) to increase the calm and beauty quotient in the space I paint in. I just have to make a concerted effort to keep it this way now!