Bright Eyes

My Niece's Son - 8" x 8" oil on canvas

This is from a children's portrait painting class, this past winter.  Gayle Levée instructed us in stages, from developing our own skin tone charts, basic child anatomy, to creating a portrait, layered with glazes, from a photograph of our choosing.  I love the mound of curly hair in this.

Painting A Live Model

Portrait Sketch - Approx. 16" x 20" Oil on linen

This week I was able to be a fill in at a portrait session at SouthGate Studio.  We had a live model and four hours to do our painting.  Fantastic practice and extremely worthwhile for someone who's wanting to paint portraits.  I hope to do more of this.  This isn't as finished as I would like (actually quite rough), but I am happy with the results for the limited amount of time.

Two Cheeseburgers, Please

Cheeseburger Cheeseburger - 6" x 6" oil on gessobord

Everyone has a special place they like to go to for good cheap hamburgers.  Mine is in my hometown.  It's a little dive that stays open late into the night and the hamburgers are cooked up when you order them.  Fantastic when you're hungry late at night.

A Year Ago

Couch Taters - pencil sketch

My daughter and her boyfriend, as they watched TV on a lazy summer afternoon.
  

Last August, I enrolled in a basic drawing class, taught by Suzanne McDermott in her studio, to see if I could draw again.  It had been years since I sat down to do a sketch of 'anything.'  I was so used to working on a computer that I felt paralyzed to put the point of a pencil on a pad of paper.  If I needed to do a quick layout of something, I'd use Illustrator or Photoshop, because most of the time I was just laying out an ad that required no real drawing skills.  Suzanne's class changed that for me.  It was great!  Basic exercises with simple subjects she set up for us to draw, then we moved on to sketching other artists' works that she chose for us.  It was the jolt I needed to feel confident to sketch again.  I really need to do more of this, to help train my eye and hand.

A Dozen Roses

Cezanne Roses - 11" x 14" oil on canvas panel

A painting in progress. I continue going back to this and finding more to do.  I took an excellent flower painting class, this spring, that Gayle Levée taught at Plaza Art Supply.  Each week we were to bring in a fresh flower(s) and set it (them) up in our own personal backdrop box to paint alla prima. The key words here are "alla prima"—I have a hard time with that, so don't follow my example.  I got the basic painting layout done in the class, but always wanted to do more.  I guess I need to loosen up a bit.  More on that, later.

FIrst small painting

Peach Bowl - 6" x 6" oil on gessobord

Sweet summertime—fresh peaches and ripe tomatoes—something to save us from the heat.  I had just cut up this peach and put it in one of my favorite Anthropologie bowls, when the thought of painting it struck.  The choice of the red napkin with this is one of my favorite color combos... you'll see.