Road Trips and Repeats

 On the weekend we did a little road trip and stopped in my FAVOURITE GALLERY IN ALBERTA!  The Blue Rock Gallery in Black Diamond, Alberta is small and gorgeous.  A great mix of pottery, paintings, arts and crafts, books.  The paintings are fa-bu-lous.  It is worth a day trip to hang out in this little town for a couple hours, great milk shakes across the street.

14x36 oil on wood panel

6x24 oil on canvas

Today I had a few short hours to work on a second version of the Cypress Hills.  The bottom one was a small quick study.  The second top one is much bigger and I am trying to do brighter colours / impressionist style.  It is not done but here's what needs completing:
- foreground is getting finer detail in the grasses - more greens, blues and purples to be added.
- foreground shape is not random enough - repeating on left and right side, needs to be more like the bottom foreground shape.
- far background needs darker, grey green / blue colours
- some more red thrown into trees in middle ground

I am hoping it works out, it looks much better in person than with my quick photo, so I shall continue with it tomorrow.

BuildingARTYeg

I was recently commissioned to do 2 paintings for Alair Homes for their BuildingARTyeg event at the Art Gallery of Alberta Art Gallery of Alberta.  I had lots of fun painting 2 bright acrylic paintings from renderings that I received.  The event was very well done, HarperPR had organized 12 different artists to paint 12 different Alair homes.  It was so cool to see how unique each art piece was. So many talented people!!

One of the other creations - Cool Bottle cap art!

My new love!

I found 'the one'!  Yes this most awesome art table (tabouret) was recently gifted to me by my actual love.  For YEARS I have just worked on any old table and it has been fine.  My most recent set up was a collapsible table I bought at Canadian Tire and covered in an industrial size black garbage bag, under which I stored my amazing huge tackle box - also purchased at Canadian tire - with all my oil paints.  Additionally I had a cheap rolling plastic bin holding my acrylic paints. BUT NO MORE... now I have this fabulous table - it fits all my paints, palette boxes and many supplies.  It has a top that opens and wheels.  I know it is wrong but I love it soooo much.

Sturdy, handsome, smells good...how can you not love it!

MMMMM...delicious art

The chocolate 'enrobing' machine - we were tempted to put our mouth under that spigot on the right where the chocolate was pouring down, but we had ample opportunity to try tons of very good quality chocolate without embarrassing ourselves.

So this weekend, good friend Mette had this great idea that we should check out Sweet Lollapalooza. They make Fine Chocolates and I do mean fine!  For about $100 you spend 3 or more hours learning all about chocolate and chocolate making, sampling a TON of delicious chocolate, sipping champagne and even putting your artistic skills to the test.  It is totally worth it and you come away with at least a dozen handmade chocolates that you help create.  Early on you spend time preparing your artistically decorated sheet of chocolate butter that will end up covering your finished pieces.  Lots of great and fascinating information about chocolate is shared, we sampled a fabulous chocolate dessert and generally overdosed on very good chocolate.  I was still full the next morning.  This to me, was even better than wine tasting tours I have been on. Check them out and sign up early, they usually book a month in advance! Yummm!

Building Art Edmonton Day, April 26, 2018

 Lately the posts have been few and far between.  I have been working on 2 commissioned paintings for Alair Homes to celebrate April 26, 2018 which is Building Art Edmonton day.  Thanks to Natalie Harper, from Harper PR for including me, I have had much fun painting these 2 pieces - which I will post next week after the celebrations.

Work at the Art Gallery of St Albert has been pretty busy this spring, too.  The kiddos in the art classes are feeling full of spring cheer - FINALLY the snow is melting and we are all thrilled to see the sun!!

Small portion of a 16x20 acrylic on black gessoed canvas

Busy... Busy...Busy

Yike, it has been too long since posting.  However I have many good reasons almost all art related.  

- I went and got all my paintings framed that I am putting in my graduation show.  THANK YOU TO Kamena Art and Framing for their awesome service.  They manage to do a great job and help me out when I am in a time crunch too.  My graduation show is occurring in May to June, I will post more on that in May.

 - I started a sketch in watercolour for aFederation of Canadian Artists signature submission, with the hopes of getting accepted.  I need 7 accepted paintings to gain Signature status one day.  So far I have had 2 rejections for other shows, so I gotta step it up a notch!!

 - I have been commissioned to do 2 paintings for an event that will be happening at the Art Gallery of Alberta sometime in May I believe.  Exciting!! I will show those here after the event happens.

-We had a wonderful Easter / Spring break and went to ski and visit the Family for a few days.  It was great.  I started to question my snowboarding skills on one of the icier days and suddenly realized my snowboard is about 20 years old now.  So now I am blaming my issues on the age of my snowboard not the age of my body!  New snowboard next season!!

- I began a painting today to thank my Bro and his family for always hosting us when we go skiing / boarding.  Pictures below of the start of my process.  Full size sketch on brown paper, then I cover it with chalk and trace my sketch onto a black gessoed canvas.  Then I will paint!  I will post that later too.

Whew... I forgot to mention work always get busier this time of year teaching art for the Art Gallery of St Albert, so there is that too.  Feels good to be busy though, love it!

Sketchbook

One of the most important parts of a good painting is always your initial sketch.  When I took my first art class I took a watercolour introduction.  Like many first timers, I wanted to get straight to the colour and found drawing 'boring'.  The more classes I took, the more I realized I needed to learn how to draw better.  Now I really enjoy drawing and sketching and am thinking of joining the Edmonton Sketchers group, part of Urban Sketchers, to get out of the lonely studio now and then and too improve my skills.

Today, here is a peek into my past week's practise.  The first two sketches I tried as much as possible not to lift my pen from the paper and get one line - I wasn't that successful with the faces.  These were both done from photos, one from an art book on Lucien Freud.  The other from a photo I took.

 This very quick sketch below was done on my iPad with my fabulous iPen in Notes.  Done from life of my dog lying nearby.  She did not like me staring so intensely at her and when I started the second one, the one of her head on the top, she got up and left, so that's where the drawing stopped.  Good practise for sketching in public I guess.

Market Madness!!

I always enjoy a good Farmer's Market and look forward to the outdoor markets starting up again sometime in April or May.  I have taken a number of pictures at them and became inspired to try and paint something.  

My first 'practice' painting is oil on black gesso on paper.  I did about 4 prepatory drawings trying to find a good composition, and came up with the 12 x 16 one below.  I had to use about 3 different photos.  I quickly became disgruntled with all the detail and some errors and it was not very loose, so I set it aside.

12 x 16 oil on black gessoed paper

 I was not ready to quit so I looked at my photos and what I kept coming back to in the photos was this happy go lucky shopper, almost skipping along with his purchases and enjoying the nice weather.  So... I decided to make him the focus and loosen up.  I got a bigger canvas, 14" by 18" and started again.  I am much happier with the result.  My colour photo of the painting below is not showing all the colours that well, the pavement has some pinks / purples and yellows, but overall it worked out okay.  I think I will try a couple more with this theme.

14x18 black and white photo of the painting to check my values

MAKING A MARK: Review: Semi Finals of Portrait Artist of the Year 2018

MAKING A MARK: Review: Semi Finals of Portrait Artist of the Year 2018

Random people

So this is what is on the easel today - in progress.  I took several pictures last year at the Farmer's Market for some material.  I really liked some of the poses and people I captured, so I am doing a slightly larger painting from one of the photos. 

 I am not really sure what the protocol is for painting random people who happen to wander into your photo.  I wasn't trying for an exact likeness of this guy, I just wanted the feeling - casual, enjoying the day, smiling to himself.  I notice there are lots of painters, like Karin Jurick, who paint great pictures of random people in art galleries, on beaches or on the street, so can't see any issues.  I could always give him a shave or add a hat if so! HA!

14 x 18 oil on canvas

GO - GO GADGET ARM!!

I GOT A NEW GADGET!  It's almost as good as the Canada Arm on the space station, just smaller.  When I am doing a painting and using a photo reference I have often just printed off the photo and worked from that.  However, the challenges of running out of ink (always!), printing a picture that has even worse shadow colours than the photo, etc. have always been an issue.  

While reading Kathryn Tyrell's blog, Making a Mark, I noticed some of the artists on the Sky Tv Portrait Artist challenge using a device to hold their phones or tablets onto their easel.  I did some research and found this baby at Staples online (cheaper than Amazon).  The reviews were good, it cost about $40 and I think it is AWESOME!  The bendy arm is very sturdy - some people complained about in their reviews, but sturdier is better in my books.  It attaches easily to the easel or flat areas and I shook my iPad all about and it stayed still!  I decided not to put it directly on my easel because it will probably get dirty fast - so right behind it on the shelf seems to work well.

On-line it said it had an adapter type piece to fit onto hospital bedrails - but it doesn't come in the box - maybe it was something you can order separately?  Highly recommend it for now.  Check back in a few months and if it gets saggy or drops my iPad I will let you know! ( I am not selling them or making any money off this - I just like gadgets)

Spring Chicken

So I had chickens and eggs on the brain today.  I got some beautiful little quail eggs and also picked up some chickens (for eating), and learned all about the Heritage Chicken Project at the University of Alberta.  I sometimes wish I could raise a few chickens in the back yard, but only sometimes... I grew up on a farm and remember some of the not so fun chicken / rooster moments.

In an attempt to get some larger painting done, I want to try quick simple warm-ups like this one below.  I set my timer for one hour, chose burnt umber, cerulean blue and white and finished before the timer beeped (by 2 minutes)!!

8x10 oil on panel