Barred Owl

I worked on this for several days and took my time.  It is a 5” x 7” for Art for Shelter. Tonight, I added some finishing touches.  I am really pleased with this one.  First, it brings back wonderful memories of a weekend spent up at our friend’s cabin.  It’s the first owl that I had ever seen in the wild at this point in my life and my spouse is the one who spotted it.  Me and another bird-photo, crazy friend grabbed our cameras and took a lot of pictures of this barred owl in a tree.

The other reason I’m really pleased with this is yesterday, when I started to paint the owl, I finally dropped into that wonderful state of flow.  I can’t say that I’ve been fighting with myself since I’ve gotten back to my daily creative practice, but the state of flow has not dropped by to visit until yesterday.  

The colors, especially the greens, are actually a little brighter than this, but I don’t want to wait until I have natural light tomorrow to post this!

Huzzah, It’s the Weekend

I felt beyond tired all week, so much so that it was one of those times that I switched to Frnch in my head to describe it to myself.  I used to say “I am fatigued” to myself in French, coming from a less-than-basic knowledge of French.  When I mentioned this to a friend, who understands these types of quirks and who also is fluent, she taught me the word “epuise” (without the appropriate accent marks over the two “e’s” since I don’t know how to do that).  It’s a much better word.  It’s pronounced:

• “A” (say the letter “a”)
• “Pwe” (say the word “we”with a slight “p” sound like from the word “pop” at the beginning”.
• “Say” (just say the word “say”)

I gave myself a break and skipped painting on several days, but I also pushed myself on several days to paint, anyway.  On those days, I went back to doing negative space trees.  

On Thursday, I started something that I want to put into Art 4 Shelter and I finished it last night.

That also gives me an excuse to post the other painting I’ve done for Art 4 Shelter. 

From Trees To Landscapes

I finished out February with doing negative space trees.  This is one of the last ones.  The overall goal was just to paint. Check. The side goal was to explore different paint strokes. That one still needs a lot of work, since all of them turned out remarkably the same. 

I still want to keep things simple.  My follow up project is to work on outdoors scenes from photos.  Since I don’t want to rush, I’m shooting for finishing 10 paintings.

This was the first one and it’s a revisit of a painting I tried awhile ago using a photo that I liked. I like the photo and I also thought it would be a challenge with getting different shades of green for the different parts.

While I can’t say that I like the finished result, I am glad that I finished it. I also focused on getting a clear foreground, middle ground and background. Also from the time I stopped after day 2 to finishing it on day 3, the green part of the tree looks more like it belongs to one tree. Mid-way through, it had this bizarre abstract quality and didn’t read as a single object or as being part of a tree.

Some things to work on are figuring out a way to make the lighter areas of the tree look better and truer to their actual size and getting the peak through color of the sky more distinct from the light colors of the tree.