Christmas Cake

We painted this as a group still life at one of my pastel society meetings - done on 9x12 UArt paper. It was fun to do, and after we all painted - the cake was cut up and we all got to eat the setup. :-)

Cindy's Pitcher

Thanks to all my friends who offered advice on how to make this painting better and stronger. I really loved Cindy's pitcher so had a soft spot for this piece. Working on the background and some cropping at the top are a definite improvement. As a result this is the only painting of my three entries that was accepted by juror Karen Margulis into out upcoming First Coast Pastel Society spring show.

Little Pitcher

I fell in love with this cute little pitcher when I saw it at a tea party at my friend Cindy's house a couple weeks ago, and I had to snap a few photos of it, and it just needed to be painted.

I'm still struggling with my "invented" background though, as the real background was just Cindy's kitchen! But I do like the pitcher. See what I think tomorrow in the cold light of day.

This is 11x14, on Richeson paper, using my cheesy Faber-Castell pastels as they were the only easily portable set, and I did this tonight over at my friend Leslie's Studio Club.

Update: Here is the current version after some reworking based on input from friends:

Jean's Lemons (three)

When I was working on organizing my art supplies this past week I came across a set of Holbein oil pastels. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with oil pastels. I like that they are "hands on" like regular dry pastels, and can be applied on top of other colors immediately in the same way - unlike acrylics and oils. I like that they also are basically never-dry so you can keep working with them, and I like that, while they do need to be framed under glass, they don't smudge so easily and immediately as dry pastels.

But they definitely feel more waxy and "crayony" - and go on more like a child's work in a coloring book. They don't blend and layer easily. I had not tried them in a few years so decided to give them a whirl a couple days ago on a sheet of 11x14 Richeson sanded paper, sort of a mustard color.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the earlier phase, because after multiple passes and attempts at layering the surface still looked like kids' crayons had run over it, with the mustard support showing through everywhere, and the Holbeins would not cover it at all. I even went over it with an alcohol wash as I had a vague memory that had worked previously in blending the oil pastels, but it was useless. Nothing happened whasoever.

I was about to junk it and make a paper airplane out of the Richeson or some such, when I first tried a swipe with my fingers, and found that finger-swiping actually blended the oil pastels! The lumpy bumpy crayons were melding together! So it took a lot of finger blending to get the colors to come together, but in the end they finally did. My relationship with oil pastels is still love/hate though!

The Shape of Things to Come

My first painting of 2016. I loved these little boxes that just came from the Dollar Tree. My New Year's resolution should be to spend more time at the easel! I have a couple shows coming up which has gotten me a bit more motivated. This was done on a slate blue 9x12 sheet of Art Spectrum, mostly my old NuPastels. My 6-year-old grandson liked it so much that he decided he wanted to paint this view also :)  :

Bottle glass

I love the glass bottles that sit on the window ledge here at the farm. I hesitate to paint them though, I can never seem to draw them symmetrically. But I decided to try today, on another sheet of 6x8 Art Spectrum. But as I suspected the bottles came out all lopsided and asymmetric.

Too late I recalled the advice of one art teacher - fold a piece of paper in half, draw half the bottle, then cut it out, open it up, and you have a perfect symmetrical shape. However I forgot that advice until after I'd already painted my lumpy shapes. Oh well, as the same teacher also said "If your bottles come out uneven just tell people it's hand-blown glass." LOL

Jean's Lemons (two)

I'm still trying to keep up with the "work small, work often" philosophy of the book Daily Painting by Carol Marine. It's helping me get a little bit more into the groove to do small paintings I need spend only 20-30 minutes on, not a daunting amount of time!

I do wish I could get better photos - the purple under the lemons is not so intense in real life, maybe I'll try again tomorrow in better lighting and redo this whole post with a new photo. But this was done last night in about 20 minutes, again a 6x9 but done on Art Spectrum Colourfix paper, primarily NuPastels. I do enjoy working small, it's rather fun, and you can whip something out quite quickly. 

Jean's lemons again

Okay, I made a few minor changes on this one because there were a couple niggly little things that bothered me, but not too much. I rather liked it as it was except for the tiny nits, and I didn't want to get too overworked or too bogged down in any sort of details. I wanted it to stay loose. So I'm considering this one "done" though a shame the colors don't photograph as nicely as I would like.

Jean's Lemons (one)

I have been away from my easel for FAR too long - so much of the rest of life seems to constantly get in the way, but today I decided that had to stop. I didn't have my grandson for the afternoon as I usually do on Fridays, so the whole afternoon was suddenly empty. As it was I still frittered most of it away and only spent 30 minutes on this painting, but at least I DID it! This is still rough and probably not done, just in the "let's wait a bit and then take a look stage". But I did it! I sat down at my easel.

I have a lot of people to thank whose various efforts led me to this afternoon:

1) Marie Marfia - who donated the book "Daily Painting" by Carol Marine to the First Coast Pastel Society lending library.
2) Kay Deuben - our FCPS librarian, who let me be the first person to check the book out.
3) Lyn Asselta pastel painter, who gave us such a wonderful mini-workshop last Saturday at our FCPS meeting - all about using a limited palette with complementary colors.
4) and Jean Rolke, who gave me the lemons that served as my models!

I chose a limited complementary palette using blue/purple and yellow/orange. Just a handful of pastels, mostly all Nupastels, on a small 6x9 sheet of Wallis paper that I happened to have. I include a few shots I took of the process along the way, demonstrating that my paintings always look "ugly" for the longest time before they finally begin to come together at some point along the line. grin emoticon Happy painting everyone. I need to set aside time to do this MUCH MORE OFTEN NOW.

 Ugly stage 1

 Ugly stage 2

Ugly stage 3

I'm a Little Teapot

Today was the day to turn in our painted boxes to the Jacksonville Artists Guild  for their "Cat's Meow" show, to raise money for First Coast No More Homeless Pets. The panels will be on display at the Reddi-Arts "Gallery 1037" In January, and of course for sale there.

Since the paintings were due today I finally sat down and painted mine yesterday - a little different since I did a cat teapot rather than an actual cat! But I figured there would be plenty of variety. I didn't get to see all of them since I didn't stay for the holiday party but just dropped off my painting and ran, but here's a sample of some of the other cat art that had already been delivered.

Julbock

Yesterday we had out third annual holiday brunch of the First Coast Pastel Society. As has become our custom we enjoy a nice meal together, and then spend a couple hours working on still lifes that have been set up. At the link above to our group blog you can see what other members worked on. The painting above is the one I did. 

It's a painting of a traditional Scandinavian "julbock" or Christmas Goat. As one of our members, of Scandinavian descent, put it: "up in Scandinavia there are more reindeer than we know what to do with, but instead we have a Christmas goat." :-)

Anyway, this was my take on the still life I chose to work on, as I decided a Goat was more fun than just one more vase of flowers. I had a fun time with my other pastelists, and look forward to an exciting 2015 with them.

Peggi Kroll Roberts workshop - Day One

My sister Amy had taken a workshop a couple years ago with Peggi Kroll Roberts and thought it was the best she had ever taken, so when she learned Peggi was doing a workshop in Jacksonville she asked if she could come stay with me so she could take it, and talked me into taking it with her!

Peggi is primarily an oil painter and it was advertised as a workshop for oil painters, so I was not sure if I could use it, but I contacted Peggi and she assured me that much of what she taught applied to any medium.

And so it proved. She spent a lot of time with values the first day, spent in the studio, with tables covered with little mini still lifes all over. We had to look at different ones and do works using ONLY TWO VALUES - seeing only what was in light and what was in shadow. Everything in shadow had to be be dark and everything in light had to be light, and that was it! Later we were allowed to add a hint of a third value if we wanted.

We then got to do a couple short paintings from the still lifes around, but were supposed to concentrate on values.

Lots of concentrating on what was in light, what was in shadow, direct light, reflected light, etc.

After lunch we had to concentrate on values again by doing a painting using a fairly monochromatic palette.

And then when we had the values worked out we were supposed to try the same thing, adding in local color - though I did add in the spoon I had decided to drop from the monochrome version.

That took us right up to 4 PM when the class ended, and thus endth the first day. Lots of fun, and the other women in the class were fun also - but a bit physically and mentally tiring to paint all those hours!

An Amazement of Eggs

I was at my art guild meeting on Tuesday night and one of the other members brought in a dozen eggs that had been laid by her own small flock of free-range chickens. I just thought they were so incredibly beautiful, so different from supermarket eggs. They were all different sizes and all different colors. I just had to take a photo of them, and then decided I wanted to do a painting of them too, even though it's a rather unusual subject. But I just loved those eggs.

This is a little larger than I've mostly been working, on an 11x14 sheet of Richeson paper, sort of a mustardy color. 

Afterglow

This is a painting I did with the hope of it being juried into the "Happy Hour" show at the Great Hang Ups Gallery.  But the show was just the impetus to get it done. I'd been planning this painting for a couple months. It's from a photo I took earlier this summer up at our old farmhouse in New Brunswick, Canada. My two sisters were both up there with me, and we were getting ready for dinner. We had bought two bottles of wine, and it was that golden hour when the last light of the afternoon is streaming through the kitchen window over the sink.

The light poured in, hitting the wine bottles with such a glow, that I had to take a photo. And once I took a photo I knew I had to try to paint it, to see if there was anyway I could try to capture that rich glowing light.

This is 12x16, and done on Wallis Belgian Mist. I still love Art Spectrum, but I'm enjoying working bigger than the 9x12 size I usually do with the Art Spectrum. The only problem I have with their paper is that it seems to come in only two sizes, Too Big, and Too Small. The Wallis comes in a 12x18 pad, and it does hurt a bit to cut off that expensive two inches on the bottom. But the 12x16 fits so nicely into the frames I have.

A Pastel Christmas

Today was the last meeting of the year for the First Coast Pastel Society. It would normally be a plein air day but we were not sure what to expect of the weather for the first of December, so we decided to meet at the St. Augustine Art Association for a holiday get-together breakfast, and then work on still lifes we had set up. Since it's heading for Christmas the still lifes all featured Christmas tree ornaments.

The weather was quite lovely in the morning and almost made us sorry not to be out in plein air, but halfway through the morning we had a rain squall pass through, which made the indoors seem pretty good! This is the painting I did, my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum.

Canna Lily

Wow, these beautiful lilies showed up in my yard today as "volunteers". Well I've been watching the plant grow, rather fascinated to see what it was going to turn into, and today I finally got to see it in bloom. The flowers are gorgeous and showy with bold yellows and reds. I had fun photographing the blossoms from several angles. But the only way I could see to do justice to them was to do a macro painting of the blooms, so I did this painting tonight.

For the first time in years I worked on Canson paper, so this was done on a 12x16 sheet from a pad of Canson, working on the smooth side. I had worked exclusively on Canson in my early years as a pastelist, before I discovered sanded papers. It's not a bad surface to work on, and the price is certainly good for it! It does lack the tooth of sanded papers however. I had wanted to added a few brighter highlights to this but there just was no more tooth for it and the pastel would not adhere.

Sunflowers

I enjoy still lifes though I have not done them lately. But I didn't know what I wanted to do in art class last night. And it turned out Christina had had a workshop on florals at her studio over the weekend, and still had a bunch of floral still lifes set up around the studio. One of them was this vase of lovely big sunflowers, so I decided I'd try to paint them. Most of us in the class work from our own photos in the studio, but last night three of us decided to do floral still lifes. One of the other women did the sunflowers too. It will be interesting to see how hers turns out. Mine was done on my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum Colourfix paper.

Dinner at Dysart's

LOL, after the hustle and bustle of '42nd Street' I needed something more soothing to paint. And what could be more soothing than a nice slice of pumpkin pie topped by freshly whipped cream! I took this photo last summer when I stopped for a meal at Dysart's, a truck stop/restaurant in Bangor, Maine that has been a family favorite for at least 30 years or more. It's not at all fancy or elegant, but serves good home-style food 24x7, 364 days a year (closed only for Christmas).

I stopped and ate there last summer on my way to Canada, and had a nice cup of lobster stew and a lobster roll, followed by this slice of pumpkin pie for dessert, and I just had to take the photos to send to family to show them I was there. Yum, dessert is finished now. Maybe next time I'll paint the lobster stew and roll since I took a photo of that too. :-)

Done on 9x12 art spectrum as usual.

A Taste of Honey

Some time ago I painted a picture of a bee sitting on a purple coneflower, which I blogged about here. My sister is a fan of bees and beekeeping, and liked it so much I gave it to her as a gift. After a couple of my paintings had been rejected from juried shows she kept saying I should have entered the bee painting, as she was sure it would be accepted.

However, 1) I had already given it as a gift, so didn't want to take it back to enter, and 2) there was a small rip in the paper which is hardly noticeable, but which I felt a judge might notice. But the more I thought about it the more I decided to do *another* painting from the same reference, and the above painting is the result.

And sure enough, I entered it into the annual show of the West Essex Art Association, and the receiving and judging was today, and it got accepted!

But so much depends on the judge after all. You were allowed to enter two works into the West Essex show, and the second painting I entered, The Old Farm Pantry, was accepted also. This is the very painting that got rejected at the PSNJ juried show in 2009, and which prompted my sister to say I should have entered the bee painting instead. But today they both got accepted. :-)

Fake Fruit

LOL, this is sort of "I did it just to do it" sort of paintings, not one of those I especially love! But I went to art class last night and was feeling blah and uninspired. I've been doing a lot of landscapes from photo references I've taken lately, and I enjoy that - but was also feeling an urge to do something from life, though no special idea of what.

But as I set up my easel I saw Christina had various objects sitting on the ledge running along one side of the room, one being a bowl filled with fake fruit, and behind it a bowl containing a plant of some sort. It was not a formal still life setup by any means. But it was right there in front of me, so for fun I decided to incorporate the two into a picture, and this is what I did, on my usual 9x12 Art Spectrum. Not so exciting a picture, but it was fun to do.