Today's Painting

"Shepherdess of the Open Sea, Source of all Fish Life"
36" x 24", oil on canvas

Flash, Shepherdess of the Sea

The body is essentially complete. I will continue to build up the fish roe and lay in the ocean over the rest of this week, and barring any problems, she will be who she is by Friday.
I am pleasantly surprised at how freaked out people are over this painting.

The fawn in the reference photo I am using was taken by friend, Marilyn Kisser. She takes extraordinary photographs of the animals that come into her yard and has been so gracious with her images. I could not have created this painting without that photograph. This fawn she named "Flash" and she IS the Shepherdess of the Sea. No other animal can fill the role.

Marilyn sent me recent photos of Flash, who has grown up. I have them on my easel.

On the easel....

Yesterday, I started having a new flare up of shoulder pain. I sort of have been pushing through it, but now feel pretty sore, so I could only paint a few hours today.
I am really intrigued by where this is going. Her little face just speaks volumes to me.....I put in a few of her "thoughts" floating up.....

Monday.....

The Shepherdess....

As I countdown to the two openings in November, my to-do list is getting longer. I spent the day photographing, assessing, and applying retouch varnish to around 15 paintings. I need RAW images of everything, as I have been really lax about getting good archival formats usually messing around with jpegs. My camera can only shoot about two RAW images at a time, so I have to shoot and then download repeatedly. Tonight I will go over the images and re shoot anything weak tomorrow.

Press releases have been send and recieved and all is on track. I will begin getting a postcard together shortly. Hopefully, I can get another newsletter out, too.

I worked on our shepherdess most of yesterday. She is coming along beautifully.

New Painting

Man, this is painting. I had to utilize my ninja painting techniques today with those ears. There is nothing in the entire world like rendering a thing like these in oil. Getting that translucent quality is worth every mix and remix of color. Carefully placing the little veins........
If you haven't seen it and would like to, the sketch for this one is posted here. It will be interesting to see if I deviate from the drawing....




Happy weekend, all and many thanks for all your comments and thoughts whether out loud or not.

Painting....

I love my creative use of blog titles....need to work on that...

Ok, so I lied about getting those images up. Worked at finishing up the "Landlord" but really was not happy, so I had to rework a bit. I felt the lion's mane was becoming an entity of its own. Though I love specific and tight rendering of paint, my tendency is to get way too much into detail overall. It is my natural way of painting, and though it isn't "wrong", I like to incorporate more loose painting technique in some areas of a painting. In college, my drawing professor stated my rendering of clouds made them appear to be made of "lead" because they were so detailed.

Still really cloudy and dark yesterday, a supposed clear up is to take place today. So, hopefully, photos soon.

I started a new painting yesterday based on this sketch: