"catch me, grandpa," redux finished

"catch me, grandpa, redux" (11"X15")

here is the final result for this painting which i finished a few minutes ago. just a little to complete her nightie and a little on her hair and the background.

sophie painting in limbo and "...grapefruit..." nearly done

as predicted i haven't had much time to paint but i have put some touches here and there on the painting of joan with a far away , pissed off look in her eye when she discovered that the self-serve citrus fruit stand had closed up early....."no grapefruit for you." borrego springs has a number of citrus groves along its north east border that sell fruit at a number of stands where you put your $2.50 in a box and take your 10# of fruit......grapefruit, oranges, lemons....whatever. we were out of luck that day. here is the painting as of this morning.

a bit more and then some

despite my silence over the last week or so i have been able to squeak in some painting time. enough to get a little further in the redux of sophie painting, "catch me grandpa" and also start anther one entitled (until or if i come up with a better title) "no grapefruit for you".

almost done

a the progress occurred rather piecemeal i don't remember the steps in detail but i did snap some photos which i will post here to chronicle the progress. of note, you may notice (or perhaps not) that the quality of the photos is much better......i got a new camera for my birthday. it is just a step below a dslr as i didn't want anything that would make me learn a new discipline. "point and shoot," is my mantra.

so here we go.......

getting there

a bit more on the reprisal (?)

i have worked a little bit more on this second take on the painting of our grand daughter leaping into the room. i worked mainly on the background and her hair. i also started experimenting with how i want to paint the checks on her gingham nighty. at this point the reddish blobs in her hair on the near side look a little weird. i think they will settle down and seem okay when i get more finished......i hope.  i am trying to do her hair without any of my usual scraping. old habits die hard. not sure why i want to do the hair this way, but the scraping out of highlights seems kind of gimmicky and lazy to me at this time. also, i have had a tendency to overdo it and then the hair becomes too interesting detracting from the face which is usually the main message of the painting. and who doesn't need another challenge? that's all for now.

i found it, from summer 2012.

...and the crowd called out, "encore, encore."

well, they didn't really, but i decided to reprise a painting that i did about a year ago of our grand daughter jumping joyously into the midst of the adults proclaiming some forgotten thought. we were up the columbia gorge nestled in a cozy cabin on a nice little stream and all were in a good mood.  i think it rubbed off on her.  i will try to dig up the old painting sometime during the sojourn and re-post it.

anyway, the challenge will be to get the mid tones correct as the "model" is a flash photo done inside at night. the other thing that always seems to vex me is the backgrounds....something i am hoping to work on in september when i take bev jozwiak's (and vickie nelson's) workshop in portland. something to act as foil for the warm flesh tones but not so busy as to distract from the figure. have to think on it.

so without much in the way of prose here are the steps in the painting to date and each represent about 30 minutes or so of work. the one thing i will say is that i think it interesting to note the shifts in color and temperature of the whole piece as the white of the paper in the background is covered up and subtly changed by each subsequent glaze. the size is 11"X15"at present and on 300# fabriano artistico hot press paper. the whole thing so far is painted with a #16 davinci  cosmotop round brush.

finish of "mustang spotting on the anza-borrego" and "suka takes the first watch"

i think these two paintings are ready for signatures. i was able to lift out the dark warm brownish blob i so expertly applied to the sky in the wrangler painting. i also put a few things in the dog painting to define the paws and some of the foreground/background a little bit. i am not that happy with the extreme foreground of the dog's painting but i am afraid that i can only make it worse by fooling around with it. i will let it set a spell and revisit in a few weeks, but for now, i will call it (sort of) finished.

"mustang spotting on the anza-borrego" (11"X15")

"suka takes the first watch" (13"X18")