It’s been (almost) a year since I last posted on this page.  I’ve worked on commissions, painted some, my cat went through surgery, my boyfriend and I went on many day drives, I took lots of pretty pictures.

I am frustrated with myself that I haven’t been keeping up this page as much as I wanted to – as much as I told myself I would when I first made it.  I have such great aspirations to do things with my art and I can’t ever seem to hold myself to them.  But I am posting now, and that is something.

It is my month off from work and I have been painting quite a bit.  Today, I went back to one of the first paintings I did in watercolor, and still one of my favorites.  The original, which you can see in the right side panel under “About the Artist”, is only about an inch and a half square.  The one I painted today is a little over 8  inches square.  There are things I like better about it, and things I prefer more about the original, but I love them both.

I am also involved in an ACEO swap which has been helping the creative juices flow, and I have painted more than my allotted share of those so I figured I will show them here.  Most of these will not be in the swap – maybe none of them will be in the swap.  I haven’t decided which ones I’ll be keeping and which I’ll be sending out, and I still have more ideas that I want to paint so I am not done making them either!  Each of these paintings is 2.5″x3.5″.

For my sister’s birthday in June, I painted her a picture of Humpback Whales, which predates the smaller version that I tried in the ACEO above.

All of these paintings were done in the last few weeks, and I am hoping that I can keep up the pace until the end of my time off from work.  The ACEO swap has certainly had me motivated, and has helped me get back into the groove again.
Finally, these two images were painted a few months back.  I was working on making my skin tone more realistic, though after painting them I realize I also direly need to work on my proportions.  Still, I like the colors and the style of the backgrounds.

And here’s hoping that I stay motivated, and it’s not another yearlong lapse between posts!

Recently, I signed up for an ACEO swap (ACEO stands for “Art Cards Editions and Originals” and are often swapped like trading cards – each card measures 2.5″ x 3.5″) and although I only pledged myself for 3 pieces, I have been really enjoying painting these tiny sized cards.  Each one takes me somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, so it’s easy to start and complete one in one sitting.

I tend to latch on to a subject matter and go with it for several paintings.  The first several that I painted were exclusively nature scenes, lots of them with night skies and moons.  Painting similar things is good practice, and fun as you hone your style.

In the last few days I have started looking at images of fish.  I love the colors of the ocean, and there are some seriously marvelous fish and plants living down there, so they seemed like the perfect subject to paint.  The Koi was the first fish I painted, but I have since tried painting two Bettas and an African Cichlid.  Of course, the night sky and the moon snuck into a picture for no good reason.

I will continue to make these in my spare time, and may end up putting a few on my Etsy store.  They are fun to make, and can be really affordable little original pieces of art!

There’s really not enough time in the day for me to pursue all of my art interests!  I need to continue with my clay creatures too.  Luckily, I have almost the entire month of July off from work, so I should be able to get done with a lot of the projects that have been waiting for me.

Around Christmastime of 2015 I decided that I wanted to attempt something that I hadn’t attempted since I was in grade school: watercolors!
They can certainly be an intimidating medium, especially for a girl who remembers lots of blotchy, frustratingly brown works of art from her youth.   Of course, I was too young to realize it then, but the trick to watercolors is the understanding that they can have a mind of their own, and embracing that can give you some really lovely pictures.

Some of my earliest experiments didn’t go as well as the picture you see here.  I tend to research new projects until I’m blue in the face, and one of the tips that I heard early on was that in order to get white to show up on a watercolor painting, that you must work the color around it so that the white of your paper shows through.  You can do this with masking tape or masking fluid, or simply being a master of the medium and guiding the paint around the white areas.

Stubbornly, I decided that since white existed in watercolor paints, that there must be a way to get the white to show up on paintings, and I painted many different simplified landscapes with white clouds.  It does work, but it has a much different feel than the white you can get from letting the paper show through.  The white watercolor paint looks almost three dimensional when you see it on paper,  as if I cut the clouds out and laid them on top of the rest of the painting.  But it works, and I like that effect, even if it takes more than a couple of white layers to get it to show up decently.

I stared to paint tiny animals.  I would paint two or three in a night, and I liked how he paints could be pastel and bold all at the same time. I gave several of them to my family for Christmas.

I had my boyfriend rattle off names of different animals so I could attempt to paint them.  Platypus!

Alligator!

Zebra.  And that zebra is still my favorite.