Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

It's official. Some of my favorite brushes are shot. Sigh.
Goodbye soon, dear friends! I will scrub my canvas with your sweet little carcasses for just a little while longer.... Until your replacements come in. Muahahahaha!

Getting new brushes is like getting a fresh haircut, or a new wardrobe! My business manager made a very good point. From now on, I am to have three or four back-ups of the brushes I use most so I don't have to fight stray bristles while waiting on the postman to deliver reinforcements.

Makes sense. But then, that's why I pay him the big bucks. Hahaha! I'm so busy thinking about everything but the tools I work with that I back myself into a corner, surrounded by splay-ended brushes and empty paint tubes.

Moral of the story, folks....

Marry a business minded person and the creative process suddenly has a backup system!

A very wise man told me:
"Behind every good artists is someone who knows what they are doing!"

Hahaha! I love it!

Morning Fog

I can't stress enough how much I love where I live. This place has more variety than you could shake a stick at... But it all still fits.

We have been getting these gloriously foggy mornings lately and I got about a million reference photos to and from dropping Soren off at school last week. This is from my first batch of pics. I'd like to do some larger paintings like this, but am having a bit of a love/hate relationship with anything over a 5x7 right now. Which is not such a bad thing, since the gallery doesn't have many of my small pieces right now.

I like this one. It'll be in Whistle Pik as soon as it is dry!

Morning Fog
5x7
Oil on canvas panel

Painting and the Color Wheel

Mr Ronald asked me to expand on something I mentioned a while back about the color wheel and painting.

All too often, we look at an object and say, "this part is in shadow so I will use cool colors to define it, and I will use warm colors to define my highlights." or vise versa.... But! When you reeeeeaaaaally look at the colors within any particular shape and value, you will see amazing variations of reds, blues, yellows, and their combinations.
Colors reflect off of everything around a subject. Look for it. The biggest mistake every artist makes at one time in his or her life is the assumption that an orange is actually orange.

The more I look for slight variations within a color, the more colors I see. If I can do it, anyone can.

Does that help?

WIP- Gated Community

I was roaming around Mason County early one morning and came across this gorgeous little scene. I loved the lighting and the cacti growing unchecked behind the fence. My husband came up with the title. He is really good with titles, which is great because I am not.

I started this piece by doing a pretty detailed sketch on the red primed canvas, then laying in my shadow areas with varying thicknesses of "dark." Kind of feeling the urge to lay in the sky next to balance out some of that dark and help put things into perspective. Balance is everything!... And nothing all at once... We'll see how the work progresses over the next few days.


18x24

Summerfield

Another new addition to Whistle Pik Galleries, I painted this one in December from a reference photo of a homestead in the Tivydale area.

To me, this piece oozes summer breezes, buzzing insects, and the glorious smells of warm grasses and fresh earth.
I love summertime!

Summerfield
5x7
Oil on canvas panel