Winter Tree is coming along.  Not done but making progress.  Sad colors.  I will work on the actual tree now to make some of the branches feel like they are coming forward and other going back in space.  I love this tree and how it arches and bends off to the side.  This painting is a little bigger than Fall Tree.  It’s 12×16 inches and Fall Tree is 9×12.  But to really capture the magnitude of this tree I think the painting needs to be huge, like measured in feet not inches.    I love working big but for now I’m working small.  My very first oil painting measured 4’X6′ huge.  I love that size but am enjoying the convenience of smaller.

And here we have the third painting in the set I painted for my sister.  This is Riley.  She is the oldest of the three.

I can’t remember if I already posted this picture of the three of them together.

And here they are in place above Sara’s fireplace mantle before they were hung.  It’s as if they were made for the space, but they were just a lucky fit.  We had something else in mind for here but this is better.

I have 2 new projects in the works.  This top picture is of the start of Winter Tree.  There is a great tree along the greenbelt that is huge and craggy and goes in all directions.  So many people love it.  In the fall I went out and took a picture of it with its yellow fall leaves and painted it.

Here’s the painting and the original photo.

On Thursday it snowed a little here.  As I was taking my daughter to school I commented to her that it looked like all the trees had been sprinkled with powdered sugar.  She told me that I should go out to “the tree” and take a picture of it and use it for my Winter Tree version.  So I did and yesterday I sketched it out onto the canvas with paint-raw umber.  This one is a little bigger and closer up than Fall Tree.  It will be monochrome. I like the start.  There are 5 trunks that come out of a big low base.  Kids like to climb on it. There used to be one more really strange low trunk that the city cut off a few years ago.

These 2 cloud painting are my other project.  I will paint a figure on each of them.  They are taking FOREVER to dry because the oil paint is thick.  I painted these exactly a week ago and they are still wet in places.  I painted them thick so there will be paint texture that you will see under the figures.  Here’s one of the finished ones.  This is a set of 3.

24″X 24″ oil on canvas

This is Mason’s sister Josie.  Along with Mason’s portrait, this is one of  my favorites.  I painted this portrait for my sister as part of a set of her three kids.  Josie is the sweetest girl you will ever meet.  She has a kind heart and makes everyone around her feel happy.  Here’s another one of her I did where she is smiling.

9X12

That one is not a great photograph.  Josie thinks this one looks more like her because her hair is pulled back, and she is smiling.  I did this one fast.

Here’s the progress.  Yesterday I worked on their skin and lips and the background.  I am keeping the painting style loose on this one.  This is more my style.  I had started painting my portraits with such detail that they started to look like photographs.  Nothing wrong with that, just not what I’m interested in.  I think I wanted to see if I could make everything look really real, and I can, which is nice to know.  There are some minor adjustments I’ll make to their chins but that’s about it for their skin/faces.  I haven’t done anything to their eyes or teeth yet other than measure measure measure to make sure their lips were right and Sophias eyeballs were in the right place.  She looks a little sleepy right now, but here eyeballs are in the right place.  Gabby’s good, and beautiful.  I like how their hair, faces, and bodies blend into each other.

This is a fun start to what will be a beautiful painting.  Unless something goes terribly wrong with my painting, there is now way this will be anything but beautiful because these are two of the loveliest girls around.  Black hair, great eyebrows, brown eyes, perfect rosy skin.  And the best dimples.  You can’t see the dimples in this image, but they are there.  I’ll work on this more today.  This will be a birthday gift for la hermanita.

 

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24″x24″

My Nephew larger than life. This is the first portrait that I did in this style and it continues to be my favorite. His messy hair, crooked smile, squinty eyes, chubby cheeks, and jammies are all very Mason. I took his and his sisters photographs when I was visiting last spring. When I took his sisters pictures I asked them not to smile because I didn’t want to paint their teeth, but this guy would not stop being silly and talking. So all I had to work from were pictures of him talking and with teeth. When I painted his teeth I started by blocking in their basic shape and color and thought I’d address them later. Then revisited the idea of painting them in more detail and decided I like them just as they are. And I’ve done all my portraits teeth similarly… just suggested. I’m not very afraid of teeth anymore. I must have taken this picture before I was all the way finished with it because none of the little space aliens on his top have eyes. And the blue is just the first hit of blue. Thanks for looking. Happy Monday!

 

These two paintings are a set.  Next week I’m taking Cade’s portrait in to be professionally photographed so the image will look as accurate as his sisters.  It’s hard for me to photograph color accurately.  The background colors are the same in the actual paintings.  Here Cade is much yellower.