Thursday, May 31, 2012

A New Leaf


My beautiful model is turning a new leaf, both in this painting and in her life.
She has always been a risk-taking, reliable, enthusiastic and very hard worker, and now she will lend her gifts to the military.  She's a woman after my own heart. 
The title can be applied to the turning of the book's page, the coming of a girl's age, or the new burst of impatiens spilling over the flower box in the background.  There is a hand at work in each of these ideas. 

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Christina in the Shallows

Christina is a model who often sits for the Houston Civic Arts Association, being as she is the niece of one of our artists, and comely to boot. She's been painted by some very famous artists, and of course by my own self on several occasions.
She was hired this day by Bill Kalwick and as I described in yesterday's post, courageously braved all kinds of uncomfortable conditions to hold a pose for us.
Since the day was gray, I presented all of my light areas using cool versions of my colors, saving the few warms for the few true shadows. The only real shadows in the whole scene were around the head and shoulder area. All the other "shadows" were really just filtered light and therefore still cool. I did use a warm tone to keep it from being too freezing cold. I applied it after she was already posed so I was worried that the wash would contaminate the colors; it was raining, which means the paint would stay wet. For that reason, my application of paint was somewhat thicker than usual but I very much liked the way it described the feeling of the scene. I hope you like it too~ thanks for visiting. 

Monday, May 21, 2012

Galveston Paint Out

Blogger has changed its editing format and for the life of me, I cannot get it to publish both of my pics in one post. I will instead tell you one story in two posts. This is a shot of a paint out in Galveston that took place a few days ago. Our model stood in the gulf shallows while fishermen caught sharks in the same water right next to her, lightning flashed and thundered behind her, wind whipped her and rain pelted her. We endured the same punishment and also had sand fleas to contend with (but we didn't have to hold a pose :-)). The middle-ground people with their backs toward you were on the windward side and had so many sand fleas in their paintings, it was like viewing the scene through a thick screen. I was set up on the leeward side. I had fleas in my gear and in the paint on my palette, but none got stuck in my painting. There were still many little gem paintings that came from our efforts, and afterwards, we enjoyed wine and cheese, still in the rain, complements of our host, Bill Kalwick. If laughter were money, we would have made as much as the model, but she was the only one who actually got paid for working this day.