acrylic on canvas, 6″ X 9″

I painted this little miss the other night and have to admit, I’m quite smitten with her. My original sketch was just a girl in hooded jacket, more along the lines of the traditional Red (or someone who shops at Anthropologie *swoon*). As the painting developed, the gal had a distinctively more modern look to her and the hooded coat became the more current dress of pretty much EVERYONE these days – the ubiquitous hoodie.

Despite straying from my original sketch, I’m happy with how she turned out. I just love when paintings take on a life of their own.

I’ll be putting her up for sale on Etsy soon. Still figuring out how things work over there.

My dad’s birthday is coming up at the end of the month and since he’s been so wonderfully supportive of my art, I wanted to make a painting for him of something that inspires *him* as much as art inspires me. For him, that’s the Dominican Republic.

For the last few years he’s been traveling there with my mom and their church group to volunteer in a village near Sosua. They’ve helped repair a roof, rounded up medicine supplies to bring over from Canada, bought new mattresses for many of the local families – generally just do whatever needs to be done. I’m so proud of them both.

The painting was inspired by a photo I found on Flickr:

I had a little trouble getting the shacks to look right, so eventually I painted over them with the little houses.  In fact, the whole thing took far more time than was probably necessary as I added more and more layers.  i wanted a lot of texture in the water and in the rocks.  I wanted lots of colors in the sky and lots of shiny glaze in both the water and the sky.  And finally I wanted to paint the edges so it wouldn’t need to be framed.  I didn’t realize I should’ve done this FIRST!  I got more blue on the front of the painting, had to go back in and add more glaze…doh!

There are still things I’d like to change about it, but the birthday boy must get his present!  So off it goes.

I wonder if I’ll ever finish a painting and actually be satisfied.  I’m always satisfied with the process itself; I love painting and feel so much joy just swirling the paint around the canvas.  But my painting skills haven’t quite reached the level the perfectionist in me would like them to.  It may be a lifelong pursuit.  And I’m OK with that.

I spent a few hours painting last night and for the first time in a while, was really happy with my end result.  I always enjoy the process of painting, but it’s soooo nice to have something turn out the way you imagined it in your head.  For this little winter girl, I used Emily Martin for inspiration and a BIG piece of paper that I’d painted a random night scene on months ago while trying to finish up some of the purples and reds I’d mixed on my palette for an art class project.  I hate wasting leftover paint, so I whipped this up, nothing I spent a lot of time on or particularly liked, but it worked great for a pre-painted background.

My process was a little different this time since the background was already so dark.  I knew normal graphite pencils weren’t going to work for my sketch, so I pulled out a light shade of watercolor pencil that worked an absolute treat!  Don’t like a line?  Dab it out with a wet paintbrush.  Easy peasy!

I wanted to go slowly this time too building up the skin tone with many, many, many (seriously, probably 30) layers of glaze.  I’d go a little pinker, then a little more yellow, then a little whiter…lots of depth.  I really liked the way that worked, but next time I’d start with a pretty thick acrylic base just to get really going over that dark purple.  The whites of the eyes took ages too, so I think I’ll probably paint out the face in a light flesh tone, let it dry, then go back in and sketch out the eyes, mouth etc.

Overall I’m really happy with it and I’m mostly attributing that to going slowly with the glaze (gel), but I also have to wonder if just painting on a bigger scale was what did the trick.  The scrunchy-faced painting I complained about before was teeny tiny – 8 inches high with the girl’s face only 2 inches wide.  Maybe I was getting frustrated simply because I was trying to DO too much in such a small space.  Leave the detail for the bigger works!

Things are looking up since my last post! The work stuff is slowly getting resolved as I migrate to a new server that promises to be better and much cheaper than the old one. I had a kick ass painting session last night and ended up with something I really like. And best news of all, my fur baby seems to be on the mend after a heart-wrenching weekend.

On Friday afternoon, Kiero, my Chihuahua-Jack Russell cross somehow hurt her leg and was letting out the most horrible shrieks any time I’d get near her. We took her to the vet first thing in the morning on Saturday (actually, *a* vet, not *our* vet since it was open on Saturday but the vet wasn’t working. WTF?). After a thorough examination, the vet couldn’t figure out where exactly the problem was. My poor angel was clearly in a lot of pain and let out some gut-stabbing yelps as we moved her from her basket to the exam table, but after touching her leg everywhere, her back, her neck, her belly, extending her leg fully and her neck too – nothing. Nada. Zip. My girl didn’t make a peep!

Thinking positively, it’s just a muscle sprain that twinges when she puts weight on it. Thinking worst case scenario – it’s a tumor that has shifted and is putting pressure on her nerve endings. Worrying about the latter and seeing her so hobbled all weekend without any way for me to help her was devastating. She’s been on pain meds for 3 days now and is eating fine, but still can’t put any weight on her leg. She seems in relatively good spirits though. She sleeps a lot (which was fine this weekend when I also got walloped by a brutal cold bug). She manages to jump up on the bed OK and hasn’t let out any of those terrible cries all day. I’m praying that it’s just a muscle tear and she’ll be OK.

My girl is probably 10 years old now, rescued from the SPCA when she was about 4, but I’m not ready to let her go. I just want to love her a little longer.

I’ve been feeling rather stuck this week, frustrated and exhausted in just about every area of my life.  Not surprisingly, this came out in my art too.  I did a bunch of new sketches of girls that I really love and excitedly set out to paint them.  My eyes are looking good, the shading is giving some lovely depth.  I was finally going to use a smallish (9 X 11) canvas I bought weeks ago.  I felt ready!

Before I started painting, I figured I should warm up a little by finishing off a painting from the summer that I couldn’t get quite right.  I tried over and over again to add depth and shade under the eyes, but blending the paint was a problem – either too dry so it wouldn’t blend at all, or too much water so the paint just smeared off and I got blank spots.  So frustrating!  Weeks ago I had just painted over the entire face and left it to come back to on another day.  With all my new knowledge of shading and gel medium, I figured I’d knock this face out in 20 minutes.  Ha!

Three hours later, I did finish the painting, but I hate it (no, didn’t scan it for you guys).  The shading turned out well, I can say that.  The face though…the eyes are a little off, the nose and mouth placement way too scrunchy, far too big a chin – just not working.  And that’s when I started to get frustrated.

I had sketched out the placement for the eyes, nose & mouth before I started working on the skin.  But as I painted, my jawline and chin got bigger and bigger.  I got flesh colored paint inside the whites of the eyes & had to go over them countless times.  I got skin in the hair and hair in the skin.  I basically kept working different areas over and over and over.  By the time I’d worked the skin, there was no way to see my original sketch for the nose or mouth or even the original jawline.

I’ve asked for advice from a couple of people and the general consensus is that it just takes practice.  Normally I’d be fine with that.  I expect that it will take a lifetime of painting to develop my skill to the level I’d like to be at.  But this feels so much like “coloring inside the lines” that it really irked me this week.

On the flip side, I can totally see why mixed media artists like Suzi Blu do stuff like sketch out their girls on wood, then do wood burning along the outside lines.  You run the risk of royally screwing up your sketch with an unsteady wood burning hand, but at least if you paint outside the lines a bit you can still SEE your lines!

Anyway, I never got to the canvas that night and have been too scared to touch it since.  I guess I’ll have to keep practicing on paper until I get my artist courage up again.  Normally this kind of stuff rolls right off my back, but I’ve had a brutal week with a major meltdown at work involving my server being hacked to the tune of an extra $900 bill in bandwidth charges plus a doggy health crisis that I really can’t get into right now without crying.  Let’s just say bad timing for art suckage!

I’m starting a drawing class at Emily Carr next week and am excited about that.  I need to figure out how to scrape up enough money to buy the supplies though.  Four different kinds of charcoal?  Really???