#128 6/19/19 VW Bus

This painting was easier than I thought it would be, but also harder.  The subject looked easy enough to paint, it's a photo I found on Pixels.  The intense orange looked like it would be a challenge.  Fortunately, a few days ago, my cousin Lori passed an estate sale find my way - a box full of old painting supplies from the 70's and 80's.  There were 5 tubes of unopened, protected in hard clear plastic, "pre-tested" Grumbacher oil paints, one called "cadmium orange".  It was perfect for this! I added a bit of lemon yellow and alizarin crimson here and there and voila - the intensity came through to my liking.  There were many other tubes of usable oil paints in the box, but most of them I couldn't get the lids to budge, they seemed welded shut.  Finally, against my penny-pinching-waste-not-want-not nature, I threw out the ones I couldn't get open, as well as the ones with leaky looking holes that were sticky and gross.  There was also 2 bottles of Schmincke German fluids, one called Leinol - gereinigt und gebeicht, frei von siccativen (translates to linseed oil - cleaned and bleached, free of siccatives) and one called Mastixfirnis - aus extra hellem Chiox-Mastix, feuergefährlich (translates to mastic varnish - made of extra light chiox mastic, flammable).  The bottles look ancient, and not much fluid is missing, so I don't think they were used much.  And where would this deceased woman have bought them here in the US, given that they're packaged for a German customer.  Did she travel, and bring back flammable liquids in her luggage???  I'm not sure if I should use them up or not.  There was also some long sheets of treated canvas....not attached to anything, so if I'm to use them I'd have to stretch them on frames myself.  That project might wait a while (like maybe if I ever retire I might get to that).

Back to the painting.  The hard part.  The VW logo.  I played with that more than anything else on the painting.  It needed a bit of precision, but not so much that it didn't match the rest of the painting.  I got that down, but then noted that the orange inside of it was much paler than the orange around it.  Adding more orange created smears.  I got that cleaned up, but still it looked off.  Once I added some shadowing under the lower edges it finally started to look like it was attached to the van and I quit there.  My photograph of the painting looks more yellow than it is in real life.  I've noticed that same phenomena in a few of my photos - that the color on my monitor appears different than what it really looks like in the flesh.

#127 6/17/19 Key West Succulent

I've been sitting on my Key West Flora photos for a while, and decided I needed to at least try an easy one.  This is the one I selected.  I thought it would go fast.  It didn't.  I needed very few paints on the palette....green, yellow and brown.  A bit of white.  Brush strokes all leading out from the center thingymabob.  Seemed straightforward.  But it didn't really look like what it was until I took my rubber-tipped brush (which I use to sign the paintings) and pulled off paint on the edges of each frond in long strokes.  Then, finally, your eye could make out the edges and I called it quits.  I think if I pair this painting with another (more obvious) Key West Flora painting, it will fit in OK.  Otherwise (alone) I think it will look weird.  Although - I could claim it as an "abstract"!

#126 6/16/19 Baby Shoes

Stride Rite - white leather toddler shoes.  People of a certain age, we ALL wore them.  So it's another painting of nostalgia.  Plus, the subject matter was simple enough for me to get it down in paint.  Except for the dang laces.  I'm still struggling with laces!  I got the parts that weren't in the mishmashed middle fine.  It's that mishmashed middle that I eventually just mishmashed some paint in there.  Then I regretted it.  So I decided I would approach it like the hands: turn the photo (and the canvas) upside-down and start again.  It went a bit better.  Not great.  But better.

I found the baby shoes at Wildflower, the barn shop in Waynesboro where I've got some of my jewelry.  Most of the vendors are selling vintage goods, and when I saw these baby shoes, still in their original box I snatched them up!  I have these same baby shoes somewhere in my basement.  They were worn by my youngest brother Dusty, and probably my other brothers and myself as well, but I only remember for sure Dusty.  Somehow, someway, I got Dusty's old baby clothes and shoes.  And I dressed my 3 boys in them.  They're still good to go, ready for the next baby, somewhere in the basement.  I just can't find them.  I'm thinking my husband may have purged a box here or there, but he's not saying.  But when I saw these shoes at the barn, I had to have them because I wanted to paint them (and I could do it without having to tear apart my basement).  That was several months ago.  Tonight was the night I finally got to it.  I wanted it to be loose, but still, I fussed.  But when I leave the room and come back and peek at the painting, I love it.  Or perhaps, I love the memory of the shoes on so many little feet that I once loved!

#124 and #125 Out of Sequence Abstracts from May

As I was looking for a few "dried enough" paintings to varnish last night, I came across these two....and realized they didn't make it into the blog, or the count!  That means I'm two paintings further toward the 300 than I thought I was!  I looked at them and thought, "just as well, yuck, these two shouldn't be counted anyway", but then I thought, "no, they're part of trying new things...tries, no matter how bad, teach a few things."  One hopes, anyway.  So, I'll add these to the collection as a reminder that if I really, really want to be an abstract artist I need to try harder.  That part of my brain, the abstract thinking part, is underdeveloped.  Sadly, I've not even a date of creation to put on these two.  Near as I can recall, it was not long after my first tiny abstract, dated 4/28/19, but before the next in the sequence, which was 5/11/19.  So I'm just calling these May 2019.

When I place the first tiny abstract next to this newer one, as a set they look OK, like they were meant to live next to one another.  Two weird, other-worldly landscapes.  The bigger one (the mostly red one, a whopping 5x7 inches) I have just named "Wildfire" as it looks like trees set ablaze in a wildfire.  I remember I used a stiff piece of fabric after I was done to wipe the canvas and start over, but with the first wipe I kind of liked all the lines it generated.  So I gently wiped the whole thing.

So, I just noticed that I start a lot of sentences with the word "so".  I went back and took a few out.  Hopefully I don't speak this way and drive people mad.

6/13/19 #123 Converse Sneakers

Another photo from Pixels....a pair of converse sneakers, just like Faith's.  Decided I needed to try these shoes on again!  The color in the photo wasn't near as clear-cut as the one I took of Faith's shoes, but I used the experience of painting Faith's shoes to influence a more interesting color on these shoes.  I tried to keep it loose again....it worked OK, though I'm still not happy with the laces, but from a distance they look fine.  Getting the wood grain of the decking was a challenge.  I painted it brown, then streaked it with tan and red (aliz.crimson, a bit more translucent than cad.red)...didn't like it, so I continued to streak some more, dark brown and dark tan, and eventually just decided it was close enough to looking like a plank of stained wood.

6/12/19 #122 - Brownie Camera

I found this photo on Pixels and really liked it....it had a hand, and nostalgia - two ingredients for a good painting.  I'm adding it to my "technology series".  I was very loose with the detail on this one, and I like the way it turned out.  I thought I might have to wait until it dried before I could put the lettering on, but I decided to forge ahead and finish 'er up in a single sitting.  The stripes are what gave me the most anxiety, but it is those that give it the loose feel (I think, anyway).  It is 6x6 inches.  After I saw the photo of the painting, I darkened up the knob on the left side of the camera a bit (it looked too bright for the shadowed side of the camera).

6x6 inches, Brownie Camera, Oil

$40, Free Shipping in the US

6/11/19 #118 thru #121 Four more tiny easel paintings

The final four.....the last tiny easel sized canvas projects, that is.  Three inch wrapped canvases, cute as buttons, so given my "childish" market recently, I painted cute as buttons subjects.  My favorite?  The fawn....last week this fawn was spotted under a tree planted at the corner of my next-door neighbor's house.  There he was, tucked up in a ball, in the mulch under a cedar tree between two houses in a quiet neighborhood.  We thought he was abandoned....gave him a little bowl of water and some baby cereal, which he didn't touch.  An internet search revealed hopeful information: a doe will leave their infant in a "safe" place during the day while they forage, the infant is without scent and thus safer alone than with their mother.  They return periodically to nurse their baby.  Sure enough, 2 days later the fawn had (hopefully) moved on with its mother.  The leafy-mulchy area was decidedly harder to paint than the fawn and I ended up just dabbing different shades of brown all over, then tan, then some green.

The two cats and the bird are taken from some free photos borrowed from the Pixel website.  Joe was a bit aghast that I should paint a cat other than Batman.  They turned out cute, but not as cute as Batman.  The close up cat looks much like our cat we had when the boys were young, "Charlie".  He was a great pet....and in this picture it would surely be identical to him if there were a snaggletooth on one side of his mouth.  The close up cat went down very easy, perhaps because he was familiar.  The basket cat was also fairly easy though, with the most time taken trying to get the basket to look like a basket without trying to paint each individual woven branch.  I finally just stopped trying.  Worst of the 4 projects was the bird....well, not the bird but the sky behind the bird.  I must have painted it 4 or 5 times, and again...just stopped trying.  I decided at the end that the sky looks like the bird is perched on a mountaintop tree branch, and there are miles and miles of free-space in the distance.

#117 6/6/19 Sign Language

I tried out something new tonight....the upside-down method of turning off the know-it-all part of your brain.  I had a pre-painted (reddish) longish thinnish canvas (9x3 inches), a question from a farmer's market patron asking whether I had any paintings of hands, and a photo from Pexels of 4 hands spelling out LOVE in sign language that was longish and thinnish.  It was meant to be.  So I traced the hands, but because the canvas was reddish, I could barely see my tracings.  So I decided to paint the background first, leaving openings for the hands, thinking that would make it easier to find the fingers and whatnot.  I painted with cerulean blue...it darkened the background around the hands barely, but enough that I could find the fingers (and whatnot).  I started with white, burnt umber, burnt sienna and cadmium red....made all my fleshtones with that....decided to start with the lights and move through the mediums to the darks.  After finishing the lights and starting the mediums, decided doing the darks next would be better, nothing was looking "believable"...then, all at once it hit!  Just like the drawing exercises I did while in Key West, turn it upside down, then look, then draw what you see, when you turn it right side up, you'll be amazed.  Well, it worked!  Shadows here, not there, a tiny highlight over there, this part is small but at a 30 degree angle, etc.  It didn't seem to look like much, but when I turned it around - there were 4 hands looking back at me!

#113 thru #116, 6/5/19, Three-inch Easel Paintings

I traced out these 4 pictures yesterday, spending oodles of time on the Pexels website to find more interesting "free" pics, selecting about a dozen, then these 4 to paint.  Note that the clown fish is back, I miss him, so I elected to recreate him...and I sent the photographer $1.  I know it's a lame amount, but the painting was sold cheap....if I advance, I'll send more.  Tonight I started painting them, starting with the owl.  I thought I'd get through maybe one or two, but I kept chugging along, my persistence getting the best of me.  I was a bit frustrated at one point and should have gone to bed, but didn't.  I couldn't get the colors right, I couldn't get the textures right, at one point I dropped the brush (full of white paint) on the finished pumpkin and had to wipe it and repaint it....and when I finally threw in the towel and went to the kitchen to clean my brushes I think I may have diagnosed my problem(s):

• My favored brush has gotten too fat and fluffy and should likely go in the trash
• I need to stop reusing old palettes of leftover paint, it's partially dried, partially dirty, it's gross
• I need to use a bigger palette, what I usually use is so small that there's no place to mix new colors
• I am too lazy to clean my brush between colors; the current color is polluted with the previous color (sometimes I like the effect of a weird color jumping in, but tonight I didn't)

My goodness, no wonder I was frustrated!  These paintings will get tweaked, except for maybe the owl, I like him as is.

#112 6/3/19 Landscape

I pass this scene on my way back and forth to work.  It's the non-stinky farm, just beyond the 4-way stop at the stinky farm.  The stinky farm has cows, and the farmers are excellent stewards of the cow manure.  I am sure they are using it to maximum advantage....or maybe they're not, and that's why it is such a noticeable odor all year long???  In any case, I pulled over on my way home last week to snap a picture of my favorite gentle rolling hill....just beyond you can see buildings from a third farm, which I didn't really intend to be in the photo, but there it was, so I included some of it in the painting (a teeny tiny structure).  The grass in the foreground was my big challenge.  I started there, and didn't like it at all, so I moved to other green sections, adding and subtracting lemon yellow.  That went well, so I put in the brown knoll and then the tan cut field just on the other side of the wire fence.  That went well, so I added the trees in the distance.  This is where I thought, "Yes, it is my favorite rolling hill!"  It's a 6 inch square canvas that I had painted turquoise blue a few weeks ago.  The sky underneath the clouds is simply the roughed in background turquoise.  I feel a bit like I'm cheating because I'm not going to paint between the clouds...because I think it will probably ruin my nice clouds.  But the nice thing about this oil-painting business: I can fix it later if I want!

6/2/19 #109 thru #111 Tiny Magnet Paintings

I've had the magnets out at the Farmer's Market several times, but no buyers and no lookers either.  Perhaps magnet canvases are too weird?  I had them priced at $10, but I'm going to go down to $9 and put what I've got at the Wildflower Market in Waynesboro for the next month....see if any sell in a different setting with a single digit price tag.  I painted 3 more magnets today....two are repeats (the German Shepherd and the French Bulldog) and one is a new subject: a penguin.  I loved painting the penguin, but not so much the Shepherd and Bulldog.  I think it's because I had already done them once, so I was expecting them to go down easier (like Batman goes down easy now that I've done him a few times).  And these magnet canvases are only 2 inch squares, so it's not like I can make sweeping brushstrokes. I thought they turned out OK, until I took photographs and saw them blown up, then I was like "Blahhhaggg!"  I've watched several you-tube painting tutorials, and they advise to step back and squint at your painting periodically.  But I say, take a photograph and bring that up on your computer monitor...you'll find all kinds of things that need fixing!

6/1/19 #105 thru #108 Small Easel Paintings

I was set up at the Farmer's Market today, and I sold more paintings than jewelry, yikes!  And the other weird thing, all 3 of my painting customers were children!  I just don't know what to make of that.  My style, or maybe my subjects appeal to the the younger crowd...and maybe my price?  I'm selling it as "student" work...$10 for the small boards, $15 for the larger, $15 for the tiny ones on the easels....pretty cheap.  So, what sold?  Two on the easels: the clown fish to a young boy, 12 or so years; and the German Shepherd to a young girl about 11 or so years; and one small board, the Tomato Tango, to a young girl about 10 or so years.  The 10 year old is the daughter of one of the other vendors there who sell produce, and she was being coached by the young daughter of the red truck family, so I'm thinking the tomato painting might be a gift for her parents, not for herself.  But the other two kids, they were definitely buying for themselves.

May was lost to other projects...I didn't get much painting in.  I'm going to try and correct that this month.  Of course, because the easel paintings were selling today I decided to paint more in that size.  Two of Batman and two of birds.  They went pretty quick, although I fussed over the love birds a bit....their kissing beaks were not visible enough, so I kept trying out different edges.  My first impression of these was "Well, they're done anyway."  A bit of frustration, born from the merry month of May where barely any paintings got done.  But after I walked away and came back after a bit, I decided I liked them well-enough.