Runabout - Greeting Card

7x5 water soluble graphite on watercolor paper
greeting card
$30 + $5 sh

Happy Winter Solstice. The days will be getting longer now. More light to paint by!

Window Seat - Greeting Card

7x5 water soluble graphite on watercolor paper
greeting card
$30 + $5 sh

Barely have had time to paint, but am doing so in fits and spurts. The season is upon us, and I am finishing last gift shopping, wrapping and shipping and beginning baking. Lots of little parties for the kids and family. Its all holly jolly!
We've snapped out of our arctic blast here and are enjoying some lovely "winter" weather - 70 and sunny. :-)

Today are the class parties and in the afternoon the Girl Scouts are going caroling at a nursing home nearby. I hope that all my cyber friends out there are having as pleasant a time - remembering the reason for the season. I myself have been a little too stressed and am trying to take deep breaths. So much to do... best to remember WHY we do it.

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Check my ETSY store for more available art. I've shipped to Italy and Australia recently. So amazed at the reach my artwork can have. So very blessed too.

Thankfully

7x5 water soluble graphite portrait sketch

Commission - nfs

Happy post Thanksgiving! What a perfectly lovely afternoon we had at Joel's on Wednesday. I got to paint and sketch a perfectly lovely young lady for a friend's Christmas gift. 

I think I made my model look a little older, unfortunately. But hopefully she will grow into her portrait! Lol

I started a second sketch using casein. But the eyes are all wrong. My limited palette of casein is an issue. As is my inexperience with the medium. I will finish this at home  either with oil or casein. 

Now - I don't want to ignore the fact that this is the biggest shopping weekend of the year (though I almost feel ashamed for us at all the desperate commercialization I'm seeing.) But truly in the spirit of expressing my gratitude to my friends and fans, I have a special discount for my email/newsletter subscribers only! Sign up today - in the right column ➡ and I will send you codes for 25% off and/or $100 off purchases over $500. My shop on ETSY is filling up with my studio inventory finally. Help me make space (literally and creatively) for new work!

In Search of Light

I read an interesting tidbit in an old magazine Color, a special publication put out by American Artist. One article had some exercises in working with relative values.
So I tested the colors I've been using to try to capture the effects of bright sunlight to see how they'd convert to a grayscale. I painted a few squares using hansa yellow, cad yellow light (hue), and white with yellow ochre. And cad red light hue just to show how dark it is in value, no matter how bright the color appears. When those are changed to grays in Photoshop, you can see how they compare to the lightest value of white (the background). The yellow ochre with white actually gives me the lightest value. Anyway ... I thought this was interesting to see that even if a color is very bright, its value maybe is not so light.