RED BARN

Deborah Secor, a wonderful artist issued a challenge over in the Pastel Forum at Wetcanvas.com.  "How LOW can you go?"  In other words, try to create a painting with as few strokes as possible.  I took the challenge tonight with a little 4 x 6" piece of blue paper, a simple farm scene, somewhat abstracted and tried my hand at aiming for as few strokes as possible.

So, how many strokes do you think it took for this painting?  Too many!  80 or thereabout.  A good exercise and worthy challenge.

Colors of Summer II - SOLD

Here's the second installment in my "Colors of Summer" series celebrating the exuberance and joy I feel looking at nature's bounties.

This is also 9 x 12" done with soft pastels.

Colors of Summer I ● SOLD

It felt SO good to get back in the studio and use some vibrant colors.  For that I brought out the soft pastels.  No medium makes me react so joyously through the process as do pastels.  I found these copyright free reference photos that just sing out summer and inspired me to try to capture the radiant beauty of the flowers all lit up.

The finished painting is 9 x 12" and I imagine it will have a wide white matte with thin black frame - giving it a contemporary edge.

Happily there are a few more photos that I'd like to use for more in this series.

Quick Sketches of Ruby

Having a new puppy is quite time-consuming, didn't remember how much so.  I've gotten adjusted to the up in the night a couple of times.  It's getting longer now between potty trips.  I took Ruby in for her shots, etc. last week and learned that she's doubled her size in the nearly two months that we've had her!  A whopping 4.1 pounds now at just under 4 months of age.  Incredible how quickly she's grown.

I discovered yesterday that she loves to munch on my little pickling cucumbers while we're out in the garden.  Must feel good on those teething gums.  As she's grown and developed, she has a cute little under bite with 2-3 little white teeth peeking out above her black bottom lip.  Her tiny top front teeth still seem to sit just under the gums.  Still she has plenty of little teeth to bite you with.  How we love our little land shark.

Between house projects and taking care of her, I haven't had any nice uninterrupted time to paint.  I thought I'd try to sit down with a sepia-colored India ink pen tonight and do some quick sketches of Ruby while she played.  Ha!  The wiggle worm made the task nearly impossible.  She just wanted to run and play and do everything she could to interrupt my efforts.  I'm afraid she succeeded, but thought I'd post the little gestural sketches nonetheless.  It was fun while it lasted - all 15 minutes of it.

Oh and by the way - she can now hold both of her ears straight up.