Playing With Paint

In my continuing efforts to loosen up, I've been playing with color and abstract shapes. In this series of self-imposed exercises, I took some of my favorite paintings by other artists that I find inspirational and I reduced them down to some basic shapes and used totally different colors. It was fun and a good opportunity to just play with paint without having to create something "serious", but I have to admit to getting restless with it. I was never very good at practicing scales on the piano as a child either...

 I'm kind of enjoying creating textures with paint.

Can you tell this one might have been a cat?

In other news, we're going to be moving again. And just as I was starting to make good connections and get really familiar with this town. Such is the life of a newly minted PhD and his family - a few years of these one year teaching positions before hopefully finding something a little more permanent. I really don't mind relocating; it's kind of exciting exploring new places. I dread the physical moving part, though. Hiring movers is outrageously expensive and beyond our means, but driving a moving truck yourself any great distance is rather stressful, too. C'est la vie.

Froot Loops Is Finished

12x16 acrylic on canvas board

The DH started calling this painting "Froot Loops". It is not my intention to keep that as the official title of this piece, plus Kelloggs would probably consider it a copyright issue, but for now it's fun. 

After staring at the painting for a week, I did decide to do a tiny little bit more to the background; just little hints of foliage and branches with a palette knife (another first for me). I'm pretty pleased with the results and the painting overall. But my open studio mentors have told me I need to bring even bigger brushes next week...

A picture of my charming model from the Pittsburgh Aviary.

Eye of the Beholder

It's not finished yet! The background is giving me fits. In my last post, the background was very fun almost like a children's book illustration, which I like but was not really what I was aiming for with this painting. I then tried to build those fun splotches of color into more foliage-like forms while still keeping it loose and fun. That was not so successful. The background began to have a disconcerting resemblance to camouflage fabric. So I worked away from the blobs and more towards hints of a habitat in the background. I do love the rich greens and moodiness in its current form, but I had hoped for a bit more...something. More abstract and vibrant? More tropical rainforest? More painterly and fun? It is hard to paint a certain way when you can't even put your finger on what it is you are after!

And this is where the eye of the beholder comes in. If I look at this painting as just a painting, I'm very pleased with it. However, if I look at this painting with my original vision for it, I am very frustrated. I showed this latest work to my husband and he argued against doing anything more to the background. He saw it as a portrait and therefore the background should be nebulous. My studio friends are urging me to work the background more. Then again I've heard many people say that the painting will tell you what to do and in this case, it seems the painting wants to be like this. Maybe I am trying to force it to be something it wasn't meant to be. Or maybe I actually need to keep working at it until I get it right. I'm overthinking this. What's your vote?

Keeping Busy

Life is a funny thing, I've noticed. One minute you're despairing of ever creating a new group of friends or of breaking into the graphic design circles in your new town and the next minute you're swamped with freelance work, friends and opportunities. Not that I'm complaining.

I've found a couple of artists who hold an open studio night once a week and I've been painting with them. It's truly the highlight of my week. Their influence is helping me to continue my efforts to loosen up, not be so detail-oriented, and experiment.

I see that while I've been away, Blogger changed their formatting. I'm sure I'll get used to it but things aren't working very smoothly this first time round. Getting images exactly where I want them in the text is still challenging. What does everyone else think of the new Blogger? 

Work In Progress on another toucan. The eye's not painted yet, so it looks a little freaky. My new mentors are threatening to hide all my small brushes so I'm forced to get over my aversion to the big ones.

Happy Spring!

Winter Reprieve

Today was a little taste of spring. Everyone was outside, with dogs and kids in tow. Even the ground squirrels emerged from their burrows to check things out. We walked around without our coats on, dodging puddles made by the rapidly melting snow. Around here, you soak up a day like today as much as you can to get you through another 3 months of possible winter.

A well-camouflaged and slightly sleepy ground squirrel.

Ice free water is a wonderful thing.

We took a friend on her first birdwatching outing and were rewarded with tundra and trumpeter swans, Barrow's and common goldeneye, cinnamon teal, pintail, and bufflehead. The ducks were too skittish to get out of the car so I couldn't sketch or take pictures, but sometimes it is nice just to bird.

Duck Season

There's a wonderful man-made pond in a park near our apartment that is fed by a warm spring. If conditions are just right, the rising steam freezes and makes beautiful crystals in the air.


The local mallard population and I take full advantage of this pond during the cold months. The mallards stay warm and fed, and I've gotten a lifetime's supply of mallard duck reference photos and sketches.


I hope to share some of those sketches with you soon but I've injured my shoulder and typing on the computer aggravates it. No, no, no sympathy please; the injury is my own fault and I should've known better. I've been a little overzealous after finally finding an affordable and welcoming yoga studio here in town. I started getting warning signs but I wrote them off as simply being out of shape and now I'm paying for not listening to my body! I am thankful that it was my left shoulder though, since I am right-handed. I hope to be able to return to writing more posts and leaving comments on your blogs soon.

Short-eared Owl in Watercolor

Here it is in watercolor. Mostly loose and (hopefully) not too over-worked but I did have to redo the left eye a bit.

The outcropping behind the owl is a buffalo jump, or pishkun. Until the Spanish brought horses to North America, the native peoples would drive bison herds off of pishskuns like this one. Hunting from horse-back was much safer and easier, so pishkuns fell into disuse over the centuries. The top of this pishkun is now an expansive prairie dog town. We spotted a long-billed curlew up there. We were also hoping for a burrowing owl but no luck. Maybe we were being a bit greedy since we'd already gotten such fabulous looks at this short-eared owl.

Back on My Feet

Ugh, I came down with my first cold in a year and a half and it was not fun. Doing any art during this time was out of the question as it was dangerous to tilt my head at even the slightest descending angle. I kept the tissue people in business, let me tell you. My week was spent just getting through the essentials and resting in between. I'm not 100% yet, but I feel 100 times better. Being able to breathe is a wonderful thing.


As is usually the case when I can't do art for a while, when I can get back to it I want to dive right in. I haven't been doing much drawing lately and I miss it. I know a lot of artists hate drawing. I know a lot of artists look on drawing as a necessary evil that you have to do to get to the good stuff, like painting. Crazy person that I am, I actually love to draw. I find it so soothing, and the feel of graphite on good smooth paper is truly a pleasure. On the first day that I was breathing (mostly) normally and had decent energy, I went right for the pencils.

The result was this drawing of a short-eared owl my husband and I saw one morning outside of First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, near Great Falls, Montana a few years ago. It was sunning itself on a fence post and allowed us to watch it for quite a while. Being the high plains, it was a windy day and I tried to stay true to the wind blowing the owl's feathers and tufts around a bit. Also notice that the owl's one pupil is much smaller than the other one because of the strong morning sun.


I may turn this drawing into a full-blown painting. I am tempted to just add some light watercolor washes to it and keep it as more of a sketch. We'll see. I still have more work to do on the spoonbill and oystercatcher paintings as well, but I'm saving that for another post.

More Works in Progress

The spoonbill painting continues to develop. I'm starting to block in the leaves, but still deciding if I'm happy with the sky. The blue seems wrong somehow. The sky in the photo this painting is based on is a deeper blue which certainly makes the bird stand out but somehow it feels like a stereotypical and boring blue, if that makes sense. Any suggestions?

I've also started another painting. I'm painting it for our living room and I wanted it to be more loose; less realistic. This is the first painting I've ever done specifically to hang in our own home. I switched to a canvas panel and I want to allow some of the canvas texture to show through. My main complaint about canvas panels is that the panels have a tendency to bow a little. I am hoping that once the painting is finished I can flatten it out somehow.

My models for the painting are from the Seattle Aquarium. The camera's flash really brought out the brown in their feathers, but I'm trying to paint the bird as you'd see it in the wild, where the natural light brings out more of the grays, blues and blacks in the feathers. These birds are called black oystercatchers, but their main diet is actually more along the lines of mussels and limpets that they find along the tideline in the Pacific. We love the Oregon coast, and look forward to spotting oystercatchers amongst the rocks on our visits so it is an appropriate subject for us. I'm still developing the background, obviously still painting the mussels, and still fussing over the bird's bill. Oystercatcher's bills are a bit unusual in shape and it is throwing me off a little. Overall I'm really enjoying the project though.

Keeping Myself Accountable

Please finish me. I'm a nice spoonbill.

Everyone seems to have stories of moving and not unpacking things for months, even years afterwards. I'm certainly no stranger to the phenomenon. I am rather ashamed to have just discovered this unfinished painting amongst my still-packed stuff, though. I started this waaaay back last spring and it got put on hold and then forgotten when we moved over the summer. What a shame! I see so much potential in this piece. My subject is from Myakka River State Park in Sarasota, Florida. It was sunning itself up in a tree in beautiful morning light. (I found it amazing to see a whole flock of spoonbills perched in the trees!) So I am posting this piece here to keep myself accountable. You all are my witnesses that I am making a commitment to finish this poor forgotten painting, agreed?

In other art news, for years I've wanted to have cards of my paintings available at my shows, or to send as thank you notes to anyone who buys my art, but the price and large inventory involved kept me from doing it. With the advent of online printing-on-demand, getting cards has now become quite manageable so I got a few made of some of my best work. I just ordered another two sets from Zazzle.com, being very pleased with the price and quality of the first two. There are a couple of shops here in town that carry local artists' cards, so I may approach them with my new cards. I've toyed with the idea of selling on Etsy or someplace like that, but I have to admit to being a little intimidated by internet selling. (Cue chicken noises in the background.)

The beginning of my note card collection

I guess this will be my last post in 2011. Thanks for following my blog thus far. Happy New Year to you all!

Full Moon

I was too lazy to get up at 5 am on a cold Saturday morning and see the lunar eclipse, but I couldn't resist getting a photo of the full moon rising over the mountains at dusk the night before.

Painting Finished

It is done...or I am done; I'm not sure which at this point! This one really was a struggle. Thanks to Marianne, Sonya, Ken and Elva for their invaluable suggestions and support through this process.

My new favorite palette earned its stripes!

Because I suspected this painting was going to take a while from the outset, I was trying to figure out how to keep my acrylics from drying out so I didn't have to mix all the colors again every time I wanted to paint. A few years ago our local grocery store was having a give-away and we received a set of sealing plastic containers. When we moved last summer I threw out most of them (they weren't very practical) but there was one shallow square one that I kept just in case. Turns out it makes a perfect small palette and it kept my paints moist throughout this whole painting, even in this incredibly dry climate.

I may take a short break from painting now. I've been feeling the urge to work in pen & ink lately, so stay tuned.

Work in Progress - Surfbird

Still a Work In Progress

I'm still struggling with this painting. It just isn't going where I wanted it to go. The scene around the bird feels flat to me, so I shall have to work on creating depth in it. And the bird just feels blah to me. Funny how I'm struggling more with a subject that's typical of my work than I did with the landscapes, which were new to me. I guess it is all about expectations - I expect more of myself when I paint birds. I didn't expect much when I did the French doorway or the landscapes so I just let the paintings happen. They were experiments, just as the abstract background of this painting was an experiment. I will have to try to approach all of my subjects with that experimental mindset!