Jill Millward Artwork

Morning Run

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22X22″ oil on canvas

I finished Morning Run today. All’s right in my world. I was lucky to get this shot last month while I was running with my group. The hills were green, the air was clear, the light was beautiful, the runners and dogs were all in frame. All the dogs but one, Penny was off doing her own thing. But I got her in there too. My only regret is that I don’t have our whole group in the pic. Sometimes there are 15 of us running together. Out on the greenbelt we are hard to miss. I’ve bought stretcher bars to do another of these, a little bigger, a different scene, and rectangular rather than square.

Another Work in Progress

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Here’s another piece I’m working on. This is a portrait of my friends parents. She asked me to paint it for them for their anniversary. My daughter painted the underpainting in oil of yellow ochre/burnt sienna (I think). She is always dying to help me, she also wrote “Hi Mom” on there. You can just see the top of the “i” in between their heads. I think this will be a sweet portrait. I’m going to leave the dads portrait brushy and rugged and fitness out the mom a little more. I will put in the background and a shirt on the mom today. Then I will make a bunch of little adjustments to their features. This painting is a first for me, I have never painted anyone older than 20. My daughter told me last night that I needed to add more wrinkles to the mom/grandma’s face, but I won’t. She looks her age here without a bunch of wrinkles spelled out. 11X14 oil on canvas.

Some Monday randomness

This is what I do while my kids are at piano lessons, knit. Our teacher requires that a parent is there through the whole lesson, and the lessons are an hour long each. So that’s three hours of sitting on her couch listening to their lessons each week. I have learned a lot and love being there because their teacher is super awesome and my daughter just said I should add the word incredible to describe her. Sometimes I knit while I sit there. I took my watercolors once and sat at her table and painted. But usually I just sit there and listen and enjoy sitting still for a little while.

And here’s a little house painting I started after spring break. I don’t quite know what direction to go with it, so maybe I’ll just leave it alone forever. It’s my sisters house in California.

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These grapevines are just to the right of her house. Very pretty place.

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My daughter loves to dye her hair purple.

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There we are. She’s 10 now. She’s my little angel.

Runners WIP

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I painted in the rest of the figures, the dogs, and plugged in the landscape. The dogs are 2 beautiful golden retrievers that are brother and sister, and can you see the little vizsla zipping ahead off trail? That’s Penny, she stayed with us last weekend so we could “try out” a dog and we fell in love with her. That dog can run and she is so sweet and obedient.

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Katie Peak

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8X10 oil on canvas

I was too busy to paint yesterday, there are days like that. The end of the school year keeps us all hopping. I finished this little foothills painting last month but never posted the finished piece. This one is very similar to my other foothill painting that I donated to the school art auction. One of my friends was bidding by proxy and was outbid and asked me to paint one for her to give to her daughter. This one is 8X10 and the other was 8X8.

Boise Foothills and Runners

I started on my Foothills and Runners painting today. This one is already a fun one to paint and I am looking forward to working on it more. The composition is such that I can feel myself in their space, but then again, I was in their space right behind them taking the picture. When I was running along that day I was out in front on the left. I saw a painting ahead of me and jumped off to the side and let everyone pass and took a pic as fast as I could. I have to be fast because they keep moving pretty quick. This was a really lucky shot of the group, the hills are easy to catch. The dogs even cooperated, you can just barely see them unpainted. I have taken so many pictures of them running. Finally a good one. Our groups official name is the Boise Foothills Running Club, but we simply call ourselves “the group.”

This time I blocked in the underpainting all around the figures in acrylics. And then I painted in the figures with oils. When I’m done it will be mostly oils. Sometimes I do under paintings with acrylics and sometimes I don’t. I’ve learned that you can paint oils over acrylics but not acrylics over oils. The oil paint doesn’t stick to acrylic paint well.

Over and out. I’m happy with my start.

The work of Dinosaur-a-day!

Check out Dinosaur-a-day. I am so in love with this little site. I get a kick out of each dinosaur post. They are all so different and fun, I didn’t know which image to share on my repost. The site is a little enigmatic to me, there’s nothing about the artist and I have no idea who is putting these up, where they live, their story, nothin. It’s fun. But I think the person doing these is named Garrick and I imagine him living in England. Thanks for all these great dinosaur pictures, they make me happy. But Dino-a-day, you don’t need to explain anything to me if you don’t want to. I like the mystery.

Dinosaur-a-Day (or whenever I remember...)

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New Painting

Hi friends! I am so happy to say that I completely finished the Maine beach scene and my client (I don’t like that word, but what else works?) came by my studio and loved it and said that each kid looks like themselves. She is picking it up on Tuesday to take it to the framer and to the art print reproduction shop to have it photographed. She is going to make some smaller prints for herself and her 2 siblings. Then off it will go to Maine. I will post the image I get from the print place, their photographs are so perfect. Mine are so blurry and the color is always off.

Now I am on to my foothills running scene. This sketch I did is 22X22″ charcoal and pencil on newsprint. I built and stretched the canvas for this size painting. I will start the painting on Tuesday. This one will be looser and more are abstracted. And I need to add a 3rd dog. These are 5 of my running partners, 2 golden retrievers, and there was a Viszla that was bounding around in the foothills out of frame. This one is for my running partner that is out in front. She asked me/is commissioning me to paint a foothills & runners scene for her.

I gave this painting to my daughters ballet teacher as a end of the year thank you. He as been her teacher for 2 years and she will have him again next year. The girl that is front and center with her back to us and the girl just to her left are his goddaughter. I painted her twice. I just found that out, so I thought he was the one to have it. I never planned to sell this, it’s a study for a larger piece I plan to do. I think it’s 11X14. A good gift size, not too big so if he’s not wild about it he can hang it in a small tucked away spot. I always joke and say, “If you don’t like it, hang it in your closet.”

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Figure 8!

There she is, the last kid to get a face. She was the first to get a suit. You may have noticed that in the original drawing she was wearing a string bikini, but since this is a painting for her grandparents, we decided to put a one piece on her. This girl is tall, 6 feet. She would tower over the little guy next to her is she stood up. I think she is a beautiful girl. At first I had her head turned down instead of looking out at us and she looked so so sad like that. Her head and hair hanging down, crawling off the canvas. She looks waaaaaaay better now. This girls face was hard to paint because about half of it was not in frame in the original picture. So I had to puzzle out what I thought she looks like, and I’ve never seen her before. Her aunt sent me some other pics of her. That helped. If nothing else, she’s pretty and I have her high cheekbone right.

Now all I have left is that clam bucket that I have been ignoring.

Figure 1 has a face now

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Hooray! This buff little guy has a face now! He was the first figure I painted in, you might remember, and I got to his face and made a few attempts at it but didn’t know what direction to take with all their faces. So I moved on from him. Now I’ve come back and put his face together. He’s cute, he has a baby face and a football players body. I decided to paint their faces in all the way, pretty tight. I didn’t know if I would like the tight painting of their faces in contrast to the loose big strokes of the sand, grass, water, hills. But I love it. The figures are starting to sit right in their space. When I paint in a face I first measure where the features will go, with my divider/compass (I think it’s a divider because it’s pointy on both sides) and I mark where the eyes, nose, ear, hairline, and corners of mouth go. At that stage the portrait is pretty terrible looking and I ALWAYS have a moment or two of self doubt. But then I put in the darks (which makes it look worse), the medium tone, and the light. I use 3 values to start. Then I take a picture of my painted image and a photo of the photo I’m using (so both are the same size) and I flip back and forth between the two on my phone and make adjustments. What needs to be changed becomes pretty obvious that way. I look at faces as shapes and values. Whew. I have 2 more faces to work out. They all have faces but I’ve found it takes two passes to get them looking the way I want.

I hope I’m not boring you all posting the same painting in parts. It’s one that has a lot to it.

I love the “heat” on those 2 girls, the one in purple and blue. And look at her little foot and the clam in her hand. It’s nice when I can look back and enjoy things I’ve painted, it’s not always that way.

Thanks for looking!