PEO Cover Art

Here's the painting I did for this year's cover of our chapter yearbook. The themes I can use are stars and daisies, so inspiration is hard to come by. Using a photo from a seed catalogue for a reference, I tried to be a little looser than usual and it worked out well. I don't know whether the subtle shading in the petals will be discernable in the scan. Was almost done when I realized I should have been working in portrait format, rather than landscape. I guess the sides will just have to be cropped to make it work. It was done on an Arches 7" x 10" cold press block.

Plein Air at Niles Railroad Museum 3/8/12

While the museum was closed on Thursday, the SCVWS Plein Air group had a beautiful day for wandering around the grounds and painting. Several of us elected to paint this old caboose. I used a tiny 4" x 10" Arches cold-pressed block and a fine-tipped black Faber Castell Pitt pen. Having the outline of the piece delineated and then breaking through the picture plane with the lamppost was something that just came to me as I began ro draw; I like the effect and wilI use it again sometime. Working with pen and ink and washes seems to yield the best results for me when I paint en plein air. I started a second painting of the old depot building, but it will never again see the light of day!
NOTE: I'm happy to say that this little piece was SOLD in June!

More Maui

Again, Arches 6"x12" cold-pressed block

Here's the second piece I did on the trip. I was sitting in pretty much the same spot as the day before, just turned a bit. It was much sunnier this time-not the gray sky of the previous day. I tried scratching some white into the water-not sure if I should have been more agressive with it. Or should have just hit it with some white gouache later.

Vaca in Hawaii!

6"x12" Arches cold-pressed block

Last week David and I flew to Maui for my birthday. We stayed at the Westin in the Ka'anapali area. It's an older hotel, but the grounds are lovely. I painted  2 pictures as I lounged by the pool on 2 separate afternoons. One of Junior's Award-Winning Mai-tais lets anyone feel like a great painter! I would have liked to go out to the beach to paint, but didn't want to pay $37 to rent 2 chairs and an umbrella for the day, and sitting on the sand would just not have worked for the several hours it would have taken me to get anything done.