Fort Macon

Still in love with my Mungyo oil pastels. This is a 9x12 on the same paper as my previous painting. This is at Fort Macon State Park in North Carolina, near my sister Amy’s home. 

Beach Morning

Wednesday I went to my friend Leslie's studio again, which is always fun, and makes me get out and do some sort of artwork even if I'm not feeling overly inspired. I started on a different painting which I hated more and more as I went on, so I finally took the colors on my palette and just wiped them back and forth all over the canvas. As I did it seemed a scene began to appear so I just pushed to emphasize it a little further. And that's how I wound up with this painting - not great art but something that felt very theraputic to work on. Acrylic, and slightly larger than I have been working lately, at 11x14.

A Walk on the Beach

Another 8x10 acrylic, done from a photo I took during a walk on the beach. I never get tired of the beach and could easily do beach scene paintings all the time! I need to sort through all my (thousands) of photos and see if I find other references I like.

This is actually a mirror image of one I did a few years ago in pastel here.  I like the pastel better in most ways, but it did have a couple things I wanted to change:
1) The horizon line was too harsh and dark. This is easily correctable if I choose to do it.
2) The lines of incoming wavelets are too perfectly straight, as if I'd drawn them with a ruler; not quite the way they are in real life.

I tried to correct both of those things with my acrylic, but I'm still less than happy with how it turned out. Still, as they say, you can't hit a home run every time. It was still fun to do.

Early Morning - Calico Creek

This is a scene down the road from my sister's house in coastal North Carolina.  Whenever I visit her I walk my dog down here in the morning. My dog is an early riser so I usually get to see the pinks and violets of the soft early morning light.

This is another 8x10 acrylic.

I love this spot so much I've even done a couple pastels from this same location, namely here and here. If you stand on the path for those two paintings and turn to face left you will see the scene in the acrylic painting above. 

Small dunes

Well I had time for another small 8x10 acrylic this morning. Pastels are my first love, but I've been having a lot of fun with acrylics lately. They go much faster than pastels, especially when you are trying to keep things really loose and impressionistic. When a small painting only takes 20-30 minutes it's not too hard to keep up with a one-a-day schedule. A few days I've even done 2-3!

Sanderlings and Waves

I'm not getting much accomplished lately since I fell and broke my wrist a couple weeks ago. Granted it is my left wrist, and I'm right-handed, but I still felt so washed out for days! And so many things are hard with just one hand - including this blog post typed with two fingers, LOL.

However energy is coming back a bit, and I'm still on my love affair with oil pastels, and with beach scenes.
This is done with the oilies on an 8x10 Ampersand Pastelboard - my fave surface for these.

More small paintings

 Breaker

Sunrise II

I'm still having fun playing with the oil pastels. They are fantastic on Ampersand boards, and then blended with some turpenoid. Finish with three coats of varnish and you have a well-protected surface. I did both of these the other day - just small 5x7's on Ampersand, using my Holbein oil pastels. They have three coats of varnish each and could easily be framed without glass - a nice savings.

Winter Morning Fishing

Today a group of us from the Art Guild of Orange Park went to the Isle rehab center in Fleming Island, FL. We had several artists who brought various items for sale, and others who worked on art projects with the residents, and a couple of us who worked on art work in public spaces. There was a potter who was quite popular, but I was set up to paint right in the main lobby, and I had a great time talking to people as I worked.

The above is the painting I did this morning, from a reference photo I took last Thanksgiving weekend when I went up to NC to visit my sister and her family. Every morning I took my dog for a walk on the beach just about sunrise, and got lots of great photos. Regular pastel would have probably gotten dust all over the floor so this was done again with oil pastels. I'm learning a little more about them, like the fact that they don't layer well if laid down with too heavy a hand, so on this painting  I worked on multiple light layers. This is done with my Holbein and Caran d'Ache oilies on an 11x14 sheet of Richeson sanded paper. It was a fun morning.

Working smaller

I'm really having fun using my oil pastels and turpenoid and creating small works. These two which I just did today are both 5x7 on Pastelmat boards I primed with Art Spectrum primer. I seemed to be working backwords. Many artists do small paintings first as studies for larger works. Me? I did larger works and then did these small ones afterwards. These are small versions of the paintings seen here and here.

Ocean Sunrise

I'm getting into a painting groove these days! I had a gallery-wrapped canvas all primed so decided to paint a picture this morning of the ocean sunrise. This is a panorama view, 10x20 inches, using acrylic.

Carrot Island

This is the third and final painting I did at the Richard Lundgren workshop, from a photo I took when I was out with my sister and brother-in-law in their boat last summer. This one was a bit of a quickie since I did it near the end of the day, but I still had fun. I only had the one sheet of black Art Spectrum, so this is done on the 9x12 slate blue-gray Richeson paper.

Morehead City sunrise

This is the second painting I did in the Richard Lundgren workshop on Saturday. Richard used black Art Spectrum paper for his demo. I love Art Spectrum but wasn't happy about black, but he made it look interesting so I bought a 9x12 sheet from him for my second painting.

And this is what I did on the black paper - from a reference photo I took early one morning in Morehead City, NC when I was visiting my sister Amy. The black background certainly made the foreground of the painting a lot easier to do! It was fun.

Thanksgiving Day Stroll

I decided to paint a full painting for the first time in my newly organized studio today. Well, I first touched up a painting I needed to make some changes on (may post that later). But that didn't take long and just wasn't quite enough. So I pulled out a reference photo I took last November when visiting my sister Amy and her family for Thanksgiving, in North Carolina. One of their family traditions is to go for a walk on the beach at Fort Macon State Park and this year the weather was wonderful for it. The whole family went, and I took a photo of my nephew Chad and his girlfriend Shannon. This was done on my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum paper with a variety of pastels.

On the Beach

LOL, I guess I took my art teacher's advice to heart, when she suggested to me that maybe I should work on a series of beach-related paintings. I love the beach so not hard to take that advice for sure! So this is one I did last night, on my usual 9x12 art spectrum colourfix paper.

Man o' War

I love coastal North Carolina where my sister lives. I love going for long walks along the beach at Fort Macon. One day when we were walking there we came across a whole bunch of dead Portuguese Men o' War on the beach. My sister warned me not to go near them, and said that even days after their death they could sting dreadfully. So I kept my distance! But they were such a gorgeous and delicate blue color that I had to photograph them, and knew I would have to paint them too.

Christina, my art teacher, says I should do more beach scenes like this, and that they would probably be popular in Florida. :-)

Done on my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum Colourfix paper.

Carolina Coast

This is just a quickie I worked on last night for the fun of it - a beach scene from Fort Macon, North Carolina. It's not exactly a polished painting by any means, but just a way to do something during the last 40 minutes of art class. It's actually a small piece, done on 6x9 inch scrap of sanded paper.

Carolina Moon

Last winter I stopped to visit my sister in North Carolina for a few days on my way to Florida for Christmas with my son and his family. My sister and I took a ride one day and went across the Neuse River on the Cherry Branch-Minnesott ferry. The sun was just setting and moon rising as we caught the ferry to head back home again and I couldn't help but try to get some photos of the beautiful colors of that hour of the day - and decided to try to use one for a reference.

The ferry ride was free then, which made it a fun outing. But I understand they are now going to start charging a stiff fee for the ferry ride, alas. :-(

Conch's Point

I'm taking a two-day workshop, today and tomorrow, with Frank Federico. He's a funny guy, great teacher, and like all good artists - seems to make turning out a beautiful painting look so easy! We were all in awe of the demo he did. Then it was our turns. Today we were supposed to do landscapes and tomorrow cityscapes. For my landscape I chose this photo I took a couple weeks ago down in coastal North Carolina, where I was visiting with my sister. This lovely view is just a couple blocks from her house, and I walked down there every morning with my dog Flo.

This was done on a sheet of 9x12 art spectrum, with a pastel and turpenoid underpainting. Now to try to find a cityscape reference photo! Eeek, city paintings are not generally my thing.

White Ibises

Ibises are such unusual looking birds, with their long, curved red beaks. I've been on a "birdy" kick lately with my herons and egrets. I decided to add a few more. This was done on 9x12 Art Spectrum paper. I used a reference photo I took this past December in North Carolina, when a large flock of 11 white ibises came in for a landing right alongside the waterfront where I was going for an early morning walk.

Ocean Waves

I finished my first painting at the Maggie Price workshop by lunchtime, so after another wonderful lunch I started a second painting. One of the other women was working on a wave painting, and I was a bit envious as I have long yearned to learn how to paint waves - something I'm clueless about!

But as I looked through my reference photos I found I did have a pretty decent shot of a wave I'd taken down in North Carolina, and decided to give it a shot. Some great advice from Maggie, but I'm still not very happy with it. Oh well, it's my first wave ever, and I'm sure I can get better at it with practice. Practice is the key, jsut as in most things. Like all my other workshop paintings this is on 9x12 white Wallis paper with an underpainting.

Today we had to do underpaintings that used only one color, but just 4-6 different values within that color. I chose turquoise for the color of the underpainting for this one, and magenta for my Beach Rocks painting.