Happy Graduation Art!

For my brother Art, who graduated from the Citadel in May. This is from some pictures he took hunting in Maryland with my grandfather last fall.

 I quickly learned that while to me the picture was about the sky and water,  to Art, the picture was all about ducks. Enter decoys:

That is where I thought the painting was complete, but there were some changes to make because I worked from a photo, not from life- I hadn't been there. If I had been there, I would have known that the sun was bigger, there were far more decoys, and there were ducks flying in the air. After some procrastination, the painting is complete!

This is the beginning of mom's birthday painting, seen in a previous post, but here the progression is documented. 30"x36" acrylic on canvas.

 The finished product, one more time:

I would say that my dad's obsession with his dog Beacon is outrageous, but my friends and family would remind me that I'm ALMOST as crazy about my own dog Sadie. For Father's Day, I painted Beacon in her favorite spot: the front of dad's boat (which is ironically named "Obsession") in a canal at the beach.

  

 About this time, I was struggling to figure out why the muzzle wasn't right and it didn't look like Beacon- my brother Art helped me out- the muzzle definitely needed more brown than grey. It's easy to miss the obvious when you've looked at something too long! 11"x14" acrylic on canvas board.

The finished "Beacon" 

 Happy Fathers Day!

 I went to Earth Art Pottery in West Ashley with my friend Ava a few weeks ago to paint pottery. I got lucky and the plate happened to be the perfect size to fit an odd glass cover that I'd picked up at a thrift store earlier. I love blue and white Chinese-inspired ceramics.

 Happy Anniversary to Nathen and Juliana! This painting is a synthesis of several pictures of St. Lucia taken on their honeymoon. I struggled with the color scheme early in the process, So I took a break and worked on another painting. When I returned to this one, I switched brushes and with fresh eyes the pieces fell into place more easily. 16"x20" acrylic on canvas.

This is huge: around 3'x4', a size I rarely work in. I took a break from Nathen and Juliana's painting and worked on this for a while one afternoon. It started out as a Venetian canal scene. I was liking the sky and the water, but I hadn't taken the time to accurately sketch the building proportions before I began painting- It was driving me crazy! So I kept the sky and created a huge loose "Van Gogh and Monet" inspired landscape on top of it in a few hours late that night. Acrylic.