Crisscross Applesauce

This is of my son practicing his crisscross applesauce sitting at the beach.

Magnetic Mural

This is the mural I just finished in my son's room. I painted a 3 x 4 foot rectangle using magnetic primer. I then top coated it with house paint and painted a copy of one of Evan's dragon drawings on top. You can see in the photo that he already has magnetic words up on it to play with.

I found the magnetic primer to be very sloppy to work with and did 6 coats of it because the instructions indicated the more coats, the more magnetic it would be. I did not find much difference between 3 coats and 6. It does the job though.

Stratford Art in the Park setup

This past sunday I was at Art in the Park in Stratford Ontario. This is a picture of my setup. It was a really fun (but long) day and I made my first sale to a really delightful lady who has just published a book. You can check her book out here. I will be in Stratford again this saturday if it is not forecasted to pour.

Hard at Work

Here I am hard at work painting live at the silent auction for Art in Action last night. See the painting I was working on in the post below.

Art in Action Silent Auction

Last night I painted live at Art in Action's Silent Auction. The auction was held at Honeywest, a local restaurant here in Burlington.

Painting live was quite a challenge but a lot of fun. I was backed into a corner, so I could not stand back from my work at intervals as I usually would. As the night went on this room was packed, but I was happy with my composition so I resisted adding more people in to it. I worked quickly, simplified, edited the space and came out with an interesting painting.

Thank you to everyone that came out (including the posse from my street); you made the night a lot of fun and a great success.

Sandy's Garden Path

This is an 18 x 24 commissioned painting that I did yesterday onsite in my friend Sandy's garden. I am really pleased with how it turned out and I hope she is pleased is well. She has a beautiful garden - so gorgeous that is was difficult to pick just one scene and stick with it.

I worked on a cad red ground and this is all done with a brush - a departure from my usual knife work - but it felt right for this subject.

My friend and fellow artist Kim Rempel kept me company and did a painting of me working on this one. Check it out here.

Work in Progress - Highway

I am continuing to work on some larger pieces. Here is the start of my next highway piece. The bare bones are just roughed in, things will most likely change a bit as I go.

My Window Artist

Here is my son, the window artist, hard at work. He is using Crayola window crayons and I am so excited about this product. My son has fine motor skill issues and getting him to spend a good amount of time colouring is tough. He spent about two hours drawing masterpieces on my windows the other day and just loved it. Every once in while I had to correct his grip, but most of the time he was practicing a good grip and not even knowing it.

(This product wipes off really easy too.)

Sandy's Garden - Study #1

On saturday I went to my friend Sandy's garden to paint. I did two studies in preparation for a larger commissioned painting of her garden that I will start on this week - if the weather cooperates. These are rough studies and the first one is the composition that I plan to go with - although once I am working on a larger format I think I will include more than this study shows. It was quite a challenge to work so small; I kept wanting to get into the small details. But doing these studies did help me work out the composition, try out different greens, and just get into the project.

Sandy's garden is gorgeous and everywhere I turned there were interesting views, plants to paint. She may find I am a new fixture in her garden (I just hope she does not expect me to weed.)

Sandy's Garden - Study #2

This is the second study I did in Sandy's garden.

Garden Irises

This is a corner of my garden. I am going to a friend's garden to paint on saturday (if it does not rain) to work on a commissioned painting of her garden. I thought I should get warmed up so did this painting yesterday.

I learned a lot and this piece got me thinking about decision-making while painting. I find painting is a series of decisions, and my best paintings happen when I am not consciously aware that those decisions are being made; I am making them intuitively.

Originally this painting had more in it; the background behind the irises showed my neighbours garden. I changed this after asking myself 'what is the subject - the irises'. To bring more attention to them I cut out the detail behind. This decision gave large areas of colour for the eye to rest, but also made the background behind the painting shallower, more abstract in comparison to the plants.

I am happy with this piece but on the next one I will try and achieve more depth while still including the more abstract open areas of colour that I favour in my still lifes.

Painting landscape involves different decisions than painting still lifes and as with anything practice, practice, practice until it is intuitive.

Circus Performers

A quirky little painting of cupcakes for today.