Jill Millward Artwork

Academy Girls

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This is a smallish study. 12X16 oil on canvas

Last year as I sat and watched a bunch of girls practice for their end of the year performance I took several pictures of the oldest pre professional academy girls. The way they were all standing around listening to their ballet instructor caught my attention. There isn’t too much slouching going on in this picture, but some. That’s what I like, the slouching and awkward body and hand positions people do when they think nobody’s watching. Sounds a little creepy when I say it like that. I have lots of photo images of beautiful dancers slouching and not paying any attention to their posture. I asked permission to paint this picture and showed their instructor some of my images and she wondered to me why that image and those girls. No reason other that I liked their unposed natural positions and the unchoreographed feel. Just a snapshot of what was going on behind the scenes before the performance. This was fun to draw. I moved the girls around to where I wanted them and took figures from several pictures and put them together. In fact, the girl front and center standing on one toe shoe is in there twice, she is standing right next to herself, the girl back in space a bit with the beautiful profile. I’m going to do a few more of these and play around with the figures positions in space and creating space without anything more than figures. Then I’ll do a big one, I think. This reminds me of what I painted in college.

I like the way this black and white image shows just values and brushwork.

Jill’s Clouds Over Foothills

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30X24″ oil on canvas

Last fall I painted several Boise landscapes. These are the hills right by my house. Boise is known for sudden thunderstorms that come out of nowhere, release all their fury, and move on leaving beautiful clear bright blue skies. This painting is how I see the sky and hills after a storm. Sunlight lighting some of the hills and clouds casting shadows on others. I love thunderstorms. And beautiful clouds. And running in the foothills. This one is straight out of my imagination and memories.

Custom Portrait/Etsy

I’ve been painting custom portraits and yesterday I took a little leap of faith and put an offer on Etsy to sell custom portraits. I set up my Etsy shop and will soon be listing some finished pieces and some made to order portraits. So check it out! If you have a photo of a child, teenager, you, or a pet, I’d love to paint it for you.

My store name on Etsy is JillMillwardARTWORK

And here’s another portrait I love:

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The style on this one is looser and their faces are more abstracted and stylized than the senior portrait above, and to me their faces feel very alive.

Today I will pick up a bunch of my work that I had professionally photographed/scanned at Evermore, an art print reproduction place. I’m excited to see how the images look. I will post them one at a time.

As for my portraits, I work from photographs. I’m 100% certain that I could work from life, but it’s hard to do when working with kids or painting a portrait of someone that is in another state or country, or simply doesn’t want to sit for many many hours. And over a period of days and weeks as oil paints dry and layers are built up. Light is also hard to control. I probably don’t even need to say it but 100% of the professional artists I know work from photos some of the time if not always. There’s always a point when you move away from the photo and create your own thing. It’s not cheating and certainly doesn’t minimize or lessen anyones work if a photograph is involved. Whatever gets you there.

Pre Professional

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Yesterday I started this new little painting. It’s 11X14 oil on canvas. There are 5 dancers altogether in the painting. One girl is in there twice from 2 different perspectives. Last year I took some pictures of a group of the oldest pre professional academy girls at Ballet Idaho who were rehearsing for an end of the year performance. I have been drawing ballet dancers all my life. I can remember painting girls in toe shoes while I was at church to pass the time. I also drew rainbows and unicorns. I was not a dancer. I was a tortured gymnast.

I also set up an Etsy shop yesterday, soon I’ll have some paintings in there to sell. My store name is JillMillwardARTWORK. I’m meeting with a web designer later this week, to set this site up as more of a website than a blog, although I will keep blogging. I’ll have a link from here to Etsy. This painting is one I will sell through Etsy.

Sweet Sixteen

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18X24 oil on canvas

A very happy birthday to this really incredible girl! Miss Danielle, the Millwards love you so much.

This painting is of my dear running partners daughter. She looks just like her mom. Running partners are something special, really good matches don’t come along very often and once you find one it’s like magic. I actually run with a pretty big group of really really incredible women who are smart, fast, funny, kind, and really driven. I am always inspired by them. They love me even when I give up at mile 20, I think. Anywho, my running partner Amanda is pretty special. Lots of miles of running and talking with her. We have run a few marathons together, including the Boston Marathon last year in the freezing driving New England rain and wind. We were so unprepared for that kind of cold and wet but we got through that one together. Love you Mandy. She has also been one of my biggest painting fans right along with my sisters. A few weeks ago she sent me a few photos she had taken of the sunset over the Great Salt Lake in Utah because she thought I might want to paint it. She included one photo with her daughter in it. I decided to paint beautiful Danielle with the sunset behind her. This is new territory for me, I’ve painted some landscapes but not many. The colors are off in my photo, as always… I decided to pull the perspective back a little to included more of the surroundings around Danielle. I will need to paint a close up so you can really see her beautiful eyes and face. Danielle is the most incredible 16 year old girl you will meet and today is her 16th birthday.

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This was my process this time. I use that little measuring thing to make sure proportions are right while drawing. And I uploaded a picture to my iPad. The photo was originally in black and white and I colorized it as I painted.

Fort Bragg Beach Scene

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3X5′ oil on canvas

I’ve decided to finally come back to this one and finish it. It’s a big one for me at 3X5 feet. I worked on this beach scene last summer after our trip to Northern California for spring break. We like to get together with family and stay at a beach house on the coast where all the cousins can hang out and play together on the beach. We usually stay at the beach for a few days and the kids make trips down to the ocean back and forth all day long. I took this picture in the evening when the sun was setting. Here 3 of them were pulling a long piece of seaweed out of the ocean, 2 were digging a hole, and one was walking around in the water looking for things. They were all doing what all kids do on the beach. The light that night was casting a beautiful light on the kids and rocks.

Marathon

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Yesterday I ran the Phoenix marathon. Busy weekend. So I thought I’d repost one of my favorite portraits. This is Gabby and Sophia. Sisters.

Signing

I love it when I see a really cool signature on a painting. I just haven’t figured out how to do it! How to make Millward cool…???

I’m nearly finished with a new piece and yesterday I signed it. I’ll show the new painting next week when it’s all done. I’m still fighting with one little part.

How do you sign your work? First name, last name, both, initials, big, small, bold, light…?

Jeni’s Peaches

I wish I had a better picture of this one! it’s one of my favorites. I painted this for my sister and her husband for Christmas and surprised them with it. I was in such a rush to get it framed and in the mail that I didn’t take any good photos. I had it framed by a wonderful local artist, Randy Van Dyke. He took it while it was still wet in places and framed it within 24 hours and then off to CA it went. I surprised my sister with it, normally I share way too many pictures with my sisters as paintings are in progress, but with this one I kept it a secret. These 2 cute little kids are now teenagers. Here they were 9 and 11 years old. Now they are 15 and 17. So, when my sister opened this gift both she and her husband started crying. I hope they were happy tears over the sweet memory of their beautiful kids. Maybe there was some feeling of the loss we all feel as life changes and time marches forward and our kids grow up, etc. She loved it and told me it was the best gift she had ever received. Of course that made me feel good.

I grabbed this picture off my sisters Facebook account. My brother in law is a great photographer and takes and posts a lot of photos. I saw this one and something about it really caught the spirit and personalities of these two. Here’s the original. I call this one “Jeni’s Peaches” because they looked liked soft rosy beautiful peaches as kids with peaches and cream cheeks. This one was easy for me because I knew when it looked like them.

Boys at the Fair

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Last summer I took a million pictures at the county fair and then decided to paint this one. These two had just bought homemade ice cream and were sitting outside the small animal petting zoo area. I like their expressions in the picture with one blankly staring and brother pulling a face. I love the colors of the fair. I especially enjoyed painting Ethan’s hand. Normally I don’t love hands but with these I wasn’t trying very hard and just blocked in the values and thought I’d come back to them and finish. But when I revisited them I decided they were perfect the way they were.