Sweet Sadie dog....

For Brian's birthday, I decided to paint our own sweet girl: meet Sadie, the goofy, cuddly, playful load of trouble pictured here. I really wanted to capture this face... her right ear is always higher than her left. While I was painting, she was laying right beside me, which helped a ton! The painting is 11x14 acrylic on wooden panel. Loving the way the water is absorbed. I've toyed with going back and adding a more complex background into the painting... I'll probably leave it as it is.

Project in progress: A marketplace full of peppers! I've been working on this commission  for about a week and a half. It was hard to decide where to start, so i knocked out the composition first, filled in what i guess would be behind the foreground i can see, and started building outward.

See pictures at the bottom of the post that I'm working from. Acrylic on 18x24 canvas. I'll continue to post progress, and am expecting to finish this next week!

Combining these three pictures, focusing on the first- I'm planning fruit on the left side in the low boxes, and some flowers in the right lower boxes I haven't started yet.

Thanks for reading!

My new love: the palette knife.

For those of you who don't know me, I rarely get stressed, even about school. This week I've been uncharacteristically nervous preparing for the first part of the dental licensing board exam. Running and art are two avenues the Lord has provided for me to turn off my brain and my "to do" list to meet with Him. As a result, I dropped my "to do" list and escaped to the easel. My next commission has tons of detail, and I thought out of fairness to the couple who commissioned me, I should delay it until my mindset was better and work on some mindless pieces.

LOVING THESE PALETTE KNIVES (thanks to my sweet brother). I love working while the paint is still wet. I love the texture. I love the expressive nature of the paintings it produces.  One downside: I'm burning through paint. 

Below are the three pieces created Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

 This is 11x14 acrylic on wooden panel.  

 12x12 acrylic on canvas....  Wooden panels really do work better for palette knife.

 11x14 winter scene in acrylic.  This isn't from a photograph... and I think you can tell. I got inspired by the colors of a January sky in a fishing magazine. I think the photo above shows the color more clearly, but the photo below is a better view of the texture.

 Up next: some commissions I've been delaying until my brain was fresh. Thanks for following my art!

January paintings... hopefully the start to lots of art in 2012.

Below is a painting specifically done for DCF silent auction. Dental Community Fellowship is a Christian organization that ministers to dental students and organizes dental mission trips abroad. I've been so blessed by what the Lord has done through this ministry during my time in dental school- so many lives changed, including mine. If you're interested in learning more about it, check out http://www.dentalcommunityfellowship.net/. Below is a 22"x28" acrylic on canvas.

 Finished: 

This is a small study I did for the painting above. The marsh grass is a little more yellow, a little less brown. A great friend owns this now! 5"x7" acrylic on canvas board.

On the Intracoastal waterway near the Holden Beach bridge, there's this "hole in the wall" restaurant called Provision Company. My family (and now friends) love to journey there by boat for great shrimp burgers, conch fritters and other seafood! So many great memories here! This painting was actually inspired by a rustic frame given to me by my grandmother-in-law over Christmas. The wood felt very much like the worn wooden frame of Provision Company... and I wanted this painting to reflect the weathered, salty vibe of this place... especially in the fall and winter when the landscape is a little gray and the place is a little quieter.
This is 16x20 acrylic (very watered down) on wooden panel. I'm beginning to prefer wooden panel for the smooth surface and the way it absorbs water.

Getting started:

 Closer view of the focal point:

 I really like it from a little further back- the bare wood showing through, as well as the vertical brushstrokes can be appreciated better! Love the rustic frame on this!

This is the photo of the Provision Company that I worked from.

More to come soon. A few more commissions, some palette knife pieces, and hopefully some photography as I learn about my new camera!

Now to post a few Christmas gifts......

 Merry Christmas Granddaddy- This is a little outside the scope of what I normally do, but my Granddaddy is rebuilding the barn on the farm where he grew up. I was recently told about barn quilts- painted on a board 8'x8' and hung on the outside of the barn... So I designed one, with the gift being the promise of painting an actual large quilt- when the dimensions of the barn are confirmed. Really enjoyed experimenting with lines and blocks of color. When we finish the large project, I'll post the final product. Until then, here's the 12"x12" design. If you think about it, just do an internet search of barn quilts- it's really pretty interesting!

Merry Christmas Shane and Kristin...  Great were my intentions for Christmas gifts this year, then I simply ran out of time. Below is Buck, a gift for my brother and sister in law. I think Buck is pretty much finished, but the background could probably use a bit more refining. Honestly, I kind of like the background simple and out-of-focus. We'll see. More later on this.... This is Acrylic on 12"x12" wrapped canvas.

 Commission for a sweet friend- A Christmas gift for her parents. My friends were married in this church, and her family has been a part of it for years. I felt so humbled that they asked ME to do this! The simplicity of this white wooden church tucked into the woods was inspiration as I painted. I think that the feel of it came through in the simple and traditional composition and color palette. Really enjoyed the trees in the background the most- I'm trying to get away from layering on the background first, then moving to the foreground. Focusing on painting what I see, not what I logically know is there, usually results in a softer image that better conveys the feel of the setting. The color is a little off, but good news: this is the last of my blog posting with my point and shoot- expect an exponential increase in quality from now on!

 Really loving the sky color poking its way through the trees here, before there are even trunks or branches.

Added a tree to the foreground- now that shadow makes sense in the lower right...

 Zoomed in view of the Church (White Oak Arp).  This painting is 16x20 acrylic on canvas.

Thanks for reading! 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Getting a head start on Christmas commissions- don't worry, I'm not posting gifts until after they're given.

This is Dixie, isn't she beautiful? This was a commission for a friend- he's giving it as a Christmas gift... but he already told the recipient (who supplied this fantastic picture) 11"x14" acrylic on canvas. I've never attempted a dog's face this close-up before!

 My first thought was, "How does one paint camo?"

This next project is a palette knife piece of clouds over water- totally created from my head. I looked at photographs of clouds online before I started, but I think I would have been wise to have worked from a photograph.

I really like this one, but at first, no one else who saw it really liked it (it's just not everybody's style), until one sweet friend- who liked it as soon as she saw it, and ended up buying it! Acrylic 10"x20" on canvas.

Bottles N Brushes, a marsh scene, and PALETTE KNIVES....

Several recent works on this post!

 Not exactly original work, but I had a blast at Bottles N Brushes in Summerville with some sweet friends a few weeks ago- We imitated Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Of course mine is the light one... I have a hard time following the instructions exactly! Not sure it counts, but I decided it fell into the "My Art" category enough to be posted to the blog.

This next series is a commission for my aunt. We were going for a coastal scene, focusing on the colors in the fabric swatches that you can see draped over the backbone of the easel (above the canvas below).  My uncle loves sailboats, and I love my uncle... So sailboats seemed essential. 

I really wanted the water to be still and reflect the sky colors, in addition to the fact that open sails would have taken over the painting.... that led me to a parked sailboat. As you can see, the marsh started out too light and the boat started out too big, but that's why fast drying acrylics are fantastic, as well as why it's always better to work from a picture than your head! When I stood back and realized the low contrast and poor perspective, i painted out the sailboat and added a smaller one and reaaaaally darkened the marsh!

This is a 24x36" Acrylic on Canvas. November 2011

 That marsh is too light and green! Much better suited for bright sunshine and navy water!

 darker marsh...

 goodbye giant sailboat!

 Hello appropriately-sized sailboat!

and here's a close shot of the new sailboat, in a size you can actually see it.

A few months ago, I ran across the work of Marissa Vogl, an artist that works with oil and palette knife. I had the pleasure of meeting her and owning some of her work. She described how she came to start working with the palette knife, specifically how it helped her loosen up. We have in common that we tend to produce tighter more technical and realistic pieces, but appreciate looser, more expressive styles. The palette knife opened up a new world of texture and color blocks for her- see her work at www.marissavogl.com. 

She totally inspired me to try my hand with the palette knife and acrylics.  Again, I didn't work from a photograph or life, which isn't ideal. The primary objective with the 3 similar projects below was to learn to use the knives and experiment with paint amount, texture, blending, and strokes. 

The slightly larger one is an 8x10" acrylic on wood panel (which i love- no canvas texture showing through under the flat knife strokes), and the two smaller ones are 5x7" acrylics on canvas board. 

 You can see some of the texture while it's still wet. This is a TOTALLY different color scheme than the sailboat painting. I love yellow ocre paint and it makes me think of the fall marsh!

on paper plates while they dried....

I love this, and I think this is a direction I could really move in and enjoy. Hoping to experiment more. The upsides: It's quick, expressive, not exhausting with details and a tiny brush, serious texture. The downsides: it uses alot more paint, so it will be more expensive, and acrylics are hard to blend before they dry, unless you use a TON of paint. One day soon, I'd love to work in oils!

More to come!  Thanks for following!