Lucky Kitties

The Millicent Roger's Miniature show was last Sat., Feb 19th. I had entered the 5" x 4" painting of Muffy cat titled "I Am Not Amused" which I had actually painted for this show last year, but I didn't get it finished in time so I entered the watercolor "Look What The Human Dragged In" in it's place.

I didn't expect the watercolor cat with attitude to sell because the watercolor roses I painted the first year I entered didn't sell. Then again, the yellow daisies painted in oil on canvas didn't sell the second year.

I was holding my breath because I thought that the painting selling last year, my third try, was a fluke. If the second cat sold, maybe I was on to something.

I was able to exhale when I saw that my painting was one of the 33 that sold that night out of about 157 entered. The gallery does take 45% of the sale which is really fair for all their work in promoting the show and it is a fund raiser to keep the museum going.

So far, the cats are up two and flowers down two. At least for this show. Let's hear it for little purry mammals!

Relationships

My challenge theme for February is relationships. I have about five paintings in various stages of completion, but I wanted to get the first one I have completed, titled "Cat and Mouse" posted. I like that I now have four paintings related to doorways. It feels like a series! Has anyone seen a greeting card company that might like this style?

I spent today getting pictures ready of the paintings I plan on posting on e-bay soon. This took all of my "painting time" today, but I am determined to keep this goal of getting actual work out to sell this month. I am grateful that I have a relationship with Jeff, because he has been invaluable in sharing his "how to" knowledge of e-bay.

I am also grateful for all of you who have encouraged me and voted for "In The Shadows", I made 2185 out of 5000 entries! Thank you!

New Year

I set a goal to paint with more concepts in mind, and for the month of January I considered new beginnings. This got me thinking about doorways and the anticipation or dread of going into unknown territory.

I liked the "Waiting" painting so much because it sent me back through our travels in Greece and the many doorways and cats that we saw there. I wanted to explore more of those themes.

"In the Shadows" was inspired by our trip to an abandoned silk factory. I wanted to capture the warmth of the red bricks exposed in the heart of the walls in contrast to the cold concrete. I also wanted to have some of the sense of mystery of "what is in the next room".

"Safe Passage" reflects the sense of hope I feel looking forward to the coming year after being in a twilight of worry for the last few months. A golden cat, for me, represents a good messenger and guide.

"Fortune Teller" is the desire we feel in wanting to know the future, but we can only see such a small part of what is ahead of us. All the constellations of the zodiac are there, but can they really tell us anything?

"Fire and Ice", the leaves caught in the winter ice by our spring and "Sheer Gold", the one amber iris I had bloom this summer are part of those beautiful moments that I just love to capture and share. I hope you will enjoy them too.

PS: I entered "In the Shadows" in the Saachi Gallery Showdown 3, a free online gallery for any artist. If you would like the fun of being an Art Critic, click on the link in my "also like"list and then enter my name in the "Search for" box. When you click to vote, you get to sign up for free on their site and then vote away! Have fun! (You get to vote for me vs. another artist, and then for all the others you want--feel the power!) The winning artists get $500.00 and the publicity.

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall

I had a great half-marathon in August, and then everything seems to have "gone off the wall" since then. First, work slowed down to a quarter of what it had been all year. Of course, I had to have a root canal in October, very expensive. Then my Mom had two strokes in November. I was lucky to be able to spend three weeks with her since I didn't have any work. While driving the 700 miles back from my parents, my transmission decides to start slipping, also very expensive. Then to top it all, another tooth filling decides to fail resulting in, you guessed it, a crown. Unbelievable.

There is some promise of work in January and February, but with warnings that things may be a bit slower. All this has made me really look at being more in control of my own work. I need to set more definite goals with deadlines for completion. I am considering seriously putting my work on E-bay. That will require that I produce more work. I have been trying out the tiny 2.5" x 3.5" artist trading card format. I like that I can complete a painting in an afternoon instead of days. I think my images are just as good if not better than some that are selling.

I am posting my first three super tiny paintings, which are canvas on tiny wood frames. I would love your feed back, dear readers, if you are still out there. I think I should get $30.00 each, what do you think?

Jeff's Corner: When life hands you lemons, throw them at someone!

Late Bloomers

Small and beautiful.

I planted my sunflowers later than I wanted to this year. Actually, I have never planted them up here before, but I wanted to see how they would do, even if they got a late start. They did come up, and after learning that I had to protect the seedlings from the birds, who ate about five of them, I managed to get nine plants growing.

As summer has ended, three of them are blooming and I keep warning the others that the frost is coming soon. The classic tall "Silver Stripe" are the ones that are not open yet, even though their bloom heads are formed. The smallest, "Music Box", which is only about 16 inches tall has three blooms on one stock, is already open and so pretty.

I feel like I have been a "late bloomer" my whole life, and I hope that my efforts to keep progressing with my painting will yield some beautiful results, even if my progress towards a career is pretty slow right now.

Shades of Grey

I am enticed by all the flower catalogs that come in the mail and I do my best to resist buying anything. I know all to well that not many plants will survive the weather or the animals here on the mountainside. But last fall, I couldn't resist the "Reblooming Irises" offered by Brecks. I was anxious all spring to see what flowers would appear. So far, only two of the six plants have bloomed. The earliest was completely white and so pretty. I have to admit, I was hoping for something with more color, since painting white flowers is still intimidating to me. Anything "white" is basically every color but white because of the light reflections and shadows. I took a lot of photos, hoping to get something I felt inspired to paint.

I hesitated over the challenge, but decided to dig in. I experimented with mixing ivory black, yellow ochre and white to get a nice warm grey, as suggested by Helen Van Wyk. This looked pretty good, but when I added some alizarin crimson to get cool shadows, it just seemed a bit pink. The principle is to add cool violets to yellows to get nice shadows. My next attempt I tried dioxazine purple instead of the alizarin crimson and that seemed better. Although, when I was near completion I had the feeling that it just looked too purple and basically awful. Jeff confirmed the too much purple part, so I took heart and added back some more yellow ochre and burnt sienna, which is in the yellow family.

This is the odd thing about painting. Often, it will look like such a failure because it doesn't match what I had in mind. Sometimes if I will just take a break and come back with the idea of judging what is there, not what I think should be there, the painting will magically transform from a complete mess in my mind to something that is not that bad. I definitely had that happen this time and only within a few minutes. I was disappointed because I thought it was so ugly I wasn't going to be able to put it on the blog. When I decided to just judge at it as itself, it suddenly looked much better. It does look different than I imagined, but I will leave it up to you to judge!

Alla Prima

In the spirit of trying different painting techniques, I wanted to try "alla prima" which is an Italian phrase that means "at the outset" or as we would say, "all at once". No underpainting, no preliminary drawing, just putting down the "shapes, tones and colors in one opaque application", as Helen Van Wyk describes it.

I had tried this before with oil paints and ended up with a mess. This time, I chose a subject I have painted before, a pink columbine and I followed Helen's directions exactly. First, prime the canvas gray so it is better to judge the color on. Sketch the placement of the image using paint. Put in the main body tones of the subject. (Not the extreme lights or darks.) Know where you light is coming from and paint the background from light to dark accordingly. Surprisingly, the dark side is where the light is coming from. Add light tones. Know where your focal point is and don't detract from it with extra fussy details elsewhere in the painting. Add dark tones and then the final highlights. Be sure you have layered and overlapped your shapes so that things in the foreground look like they belong there. Piece of cake...

Five hours later I had a pretty good little painting. I was hoping for two hours since my canvas was only 4" x 5", but size doesn't seem to matter when you are learning.

I will now share the amazing answer of what happens when you mix Alizarin Crimson and Viridian Green. I was sure I would get some weird brown, but it was the loveliest shade of purple gray. The color mixing principle I was using was to get the shadow tone of a pink flower by adding it's color complement, green. You can see this color on the pink petals of the columbine. I love learning new things that surprise me and I think I will try this style of painting again.

Jeff's Corner: What? Size doesn't matter??!!