Away too long ...

As much as I enjoy seeing other artists' blogs updated almost on a daily basis, I am afraid I have been so not able to devote time and attention to my blog.  It's not that I haven't been painting, I have been painting for classes and student demonstrations.  As many of you know, I have been creating calendars from watercolor paintings I have done during each of the past four years.  It might be that I will share those, but not today.

As much as I have loved painting with watercolors, I am so loving painting with acrylics.  I teach both watercolors and acrylics, but I am finding that when I paint just for the fun of it, I am painting more with acrylics than watercolors.  Acrylics continue to make me smile, and I get less stressed out when I am messing about in acrylics.  A couple of recent acrylics [since my last blog entry!] are below.

This photo of my birches painting was taken by my friend, Linda, at the art show where it was sold.  I was in such a rush to get the painting in to the show, that I forogt to take a photo in good light at home.  I used this painting as a demo for acrylics classes using palette knives.  The students loved the lesson and did great work to boot!

This was another acrylic I did to use as my Christmas card.   My son looked at it, and said that it didn't look anything LIKE my granddaughter.  Well, that is really fine, because it was not meant to.  Odd, that he made a negative statement that I interpret as a positive.  It IS sort of a stylized impression of a young girl that might look like my granddaughter with some tweaking.  Anyway, I was happy with the outcome.

Th tulip picker is from a photo I took several years ago during the Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley about five minutes from where I live.  When I took the photo, the young man was as shocked as I was to see him.  He smiled, I smiled and I clicked the picture.  I tried to paint it several times as a watercolor, but it always lacked something and never seemed to come together.  During my "playing with knives" period this past fall and winter, I did this totally with palette knives.  I thoroughly enjoyed the process as I always do when playing with knives ...  I am now understanding that it is truly about hte process as much as it is about the outcome. 

Art League North, one of the painting groups I belonged to, liked the outcome as well.  They selected it to be used for the 2011 Tulip Festival Art Bash Show poster.  Am pleased with that, and humbled because there were so many other great paintings in the running.

Well, now that I have caught up somewhat, I am promising myself that I will be more attentive to updating my blog.  It's a discipline as much as anything else, and it makes me accounatable to you and to myself for painting more and sharing more.  

Would love for those of you who are dropping by the blog anonymously, to comment, good or not so good, comments and questions.  You can sign up to receive notificaton of the random and hopefully more often, posts I make.  Would love to hear from you!