Day 18

Joy today is oil paint.  I finally spent some time at the easel for the first time this year.  :)

Day 17

Joy today is Tylenol, because my head and shoulders really hurt a lot...a hot shower didn't fix it, but the Tylenol is working.  So I am glad it is here.

Day 16

Joy today is getting my driver's license renewed.  Now that might seem an odd thing to be a joy- but since I was told growing up that I wouldn't be able to drive due to my wonky eyes, it's a big deal to me.  Even the trip to the DMV was painless and relatively fast.

I think the eye dr I had as a teen wasn't a particularly good one-  since he might have contributed to the no driving thing.  He also told me once that I have no peripheral vision, which is completely wrong.  My vision field is, as my eye dr today said, textbook perfect.  And he would know, since I have to take a visual field test every year.

Day 15

Joy today is a whole entire day to not have to do anything, go anywhere, run any errands, or take my daughter out,

Day 14

Joy today is unexpected alone time while my daughter is at a no-parents birthday party!  And even better, her friend is also vegetarian!  It's good for her to have peer support.   :)

Day 13

Joy is getting my portrait swap painting in the mail!!!  Almost a month and a half after it was sent- we thought it was lost in the mail and I was very sad. I painted Dave, and Dave painted me!  Picture later.

Day 12

Joy is a hot bath with grapefruit lemon soap.

Day 11

Joy today is evening silence.

Day 10

Joy today is good friends.

Day 9

Snow!!
I don't have to drive in it, I don't have to shovel it.  Joy.  :)

Day 8

I am feeling joyful today about the snowstorm that is coming tomorrow night!!

Day 7

Joy today is an absolutely perfect cup of looseleaf organic assam tea.

Day 6

Joy today is a relaxing day.

Day 5

Joy today is having finished all the tasks I had to do at the office this week, with nothing hanging over me this weekend.

Day 4

Joy today is reading a good book.  :)

Day 3

Joy today is a warm furry purring kitty cat.

Day 2

Joy today is making and decorating gingerbread cookies with my daughter!  They didn't come out as good as the ones my friend Jane gave us, so I'll have to make them again to perfect the recipe.  :)

Day 1

Today was my official start of Soul Coaching. This is my third year going through the program and it really is wonderful. Like last year, I will keep my joy journal online this time around.

My joy for today is unexpected gifts. Today was the first day back at work after the holidays. It is well-known in the office that i love my tea, and I am always sharing tea with those who sit around me. My co-worker went to Disney World over the break. He went into a tea shop and saw a box of green tea with different flavorings. He said he thought of me and got me a box! Wasn't that nice?

2011

Well, it is the start of yet another new year. As always, I set intentions rather than resolutions.

Here are my intentions:
*Drink a lot of tea
*Go through my Portrait Painting Atelier book
*Artistic focus: direct layered paintings, portraiture and plein air. Last year I completed 74 paintings!! It is time to slow down and start applying all that practice to longer, more finished works.
*Go through the Soul Coaching program again.
*Change my name back (finally!!)
*A secret intention that i am not announcing publicly until it is concrete

How to Get Everything You Want for Christmas

My 5 year old basically got everything she wanted for Christmas. But not because she is some super-angel child (which she is most of the time) or any successful wheedling tactics.

No, she did it the old fashioned way and wrote a good solid list for Santa. She even put in there (somewhere) "tea for Mommy".

This list, however, was a little non-traditional, guaranteed to get Santa's attention. She used the back of a piece of paper that was floating around my apartment...the color reference I used when i painted Twilight...

Whatever works, right?

Mr. Jitters

Drusilla and her 3 rat boys are staying with us for the holidays.  Here is a little painting of her hairless rat, Mr. Jitters.

2 hours, 8x10 oil on canvas

Plein Air 39

It's 27 degrees out today (that's -3 for you Celsius fans) and I have a day off, so I went out painting in Central Park.  It was cold and I was standing on a steep slope which was really uncomfortable.

This morning before I left my friend sent me a text WITH CAPITAL LETTERS  telling me I HAD to get a copy of Pema Chodron's Unconditional Confidence as soon as possible.  So I did, because I usually recognize obvious Signs when I see them.

I started listening to the lecture right exactly as I started painting.  Pema's opening lines in the speech were about- the act of starting a painting- and I do mean I was literally laying out my first brush strokes on the blank panel as she was saying it.  And this was not a lecture on painting.

(By the way, it is an excellent lecture and I highly recommend it)

I like when things like this happen, the moments of obvious synchronicity.  Things for me have been very quiet on the spiritual front. And life in general.  I have felt uninspired and generally in a flat place.  Like the Nice Guidance Voices have gone quiet and have been busy with other things.  So it is really nice when the universe says HI I AM HERE!! in a way I cannot possibly miss or misinterpret.


Anyhow, here is the painting.  8x10 oil on panel, one hour, it was toned with yellow ochre but I like an earth red undertone better.

Palette: Fanchon Red, Yellow Ochre, Lemon Yellow, Pthalo Green, French Ultramarine, and Burnt Umber.
I like this particular palette quite a lot, it might be my favorite plein air palette to date.

Today was also my new knife's first outing.  She had a great time.  I should have put more of that red leaf ground color in the rocks.

Dave

Here is Dave from this year's portrait swap.  I love portraiture and need lots of practice... next year, in addition to plein air, I want to really focus on bettering my portrait skills.

Dave was so much fun to paint.

9x12 oil on panel (click image for larger view)

How To Traumatize Your Cat

My daughter has a purple unicorn marionette.
It got terribly tangled.  The task of untangling it fell on me, by default.

Untangling it took over an hour.

When I was finished, I played with it  near the cat, who is sitting next to me on the couch.  At first, she was curious.  Then, she realized THIS THING IS ALIVE! and freaked out- screaming and hissing!

My cat does not think it is funny but I do.

Here is the scary cat-terrorizing unicorn.  Kitty hissed three times during the shooting of this photo.

Plein Air 37 & 38 & Retirement Day

Today I took a vacation day and went on a painting workshop with Danielle Hatherley again.  One of her students got permission for us to paint in the health club of her building, 36 stories up.  It was an awesome building with an incredible 360 degree view right on the East River.

I finished 2 paintings, both are 9x12 oil on panel:

The second is a Leftover Paint Painting... just a quick something to use up the extra paint from the first painting.

The view was wonderful!

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Today also marks Retirement Day of my Painting BFF- so I am glad it got to go on such a nice outing.

My fabulous palette knife, an old Lowell-Cornell, model number long obscured by layers of paint. I have been painting with this knife for the last 14 years. In fact, I can't paint without it. It's comfortable and has character, and it is well-made.

Knives like this are hard to find these days- the reason it is so good is because the blade and handle are all one piece of metal.  They just don't make them like they used to.

Because there are cracks in the paint which covers the blade, and because my friend on Wet Canvas recently had her much-beloved palette knife break, I'm a little nervous.  So I used some birthday money to finally invest in a Holbein Knife. 

There are no better knives than Holbein knives.  With the exception of something tragic and unforeseen, I will never have to replace this new knife for as long as I live.  It is tempered Japanese steel, all one piece.  It is beautiful. lightweight, and wonderfully flexible.  I will miss my old knife, but I know I'll love the new one just as much!

Dave (Study)

This is a pastel study of Dave, my partner in this year's portrait swap.  I'll move on to the oil painting this week.

9x12 pastel on Colorfix

Happy Halloween!

Halloween this year was a great time.  It was the return of Bumble-Rat and Ladybug Rat.  The cool thing about having white rats is you can paint them with airbrush markers.

I carried Ali around for Trick or Treating.  People gave them chocolate and their very favorite treat, Swedish Fish.

Daya also had a great time.  She was Cinderella this year.

 

Twilight (after Bouguereau)- Finally Finished!

After seven months this painting is finally done!
I started in March and finished the underpainting in July.
It needs to be scanned instead of photographed but it is too wet right now.

I am not doing anymore grisaille/glazing for the foreseeable future; this is not how i enjoy working.

View progress shots here.

10x20 oil on canvas

Another photo with different light:

 

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I bought the cutest little gourds at the store the other day so I could paint them. For the past few days I have been wanting to paint a gourd with my Maimeri Italian Earth paints... so as a reward to myself for finally finishing Twilight, and also for the Feat of Extreme Discipline for not starting another painting until Twilight was finished, I painted a little gourd.

The Italian Earth paints are fascinating... they are actual earth pigments from different regions in Italy. They are low chroma and transparent, and although I find I can't push them the way I can with other pigments, I still love them. especially the greens.

I do think I'll do better with them when they aren't the only colors in the palette, but as accents to a more well-rounded selection. I like the earthiness and somewhat grittiness of them, and also like thinking of what the old masters did with such limited materials.

8x10 oil on canvas panel, an hour and a half.

Plein Air 35 and 36

I took a plein air workshop today with the wonderful Danielle Hatherley.  Since Daya is usually with me when I am not at work, it's rare to have a child-free full day of painting outdoors.  I have been wanting to take a workshop for a while and this was a great experience, something I'll definitely do again. It was great to spend lots of time on each painting.

We painted at the Boat basin in Riverside Park. Palette: Alizarin, Cadmium Red Light, Indian Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, Maganese Blue, French Ultramarine, and white.

Both are 9x12 oil on panel

Plein Air 33 and 34

Since I had to go to Daya's school this morning, I just took the whole day off to make the already-long weekend extra long.

Of course I went out painting.  I have been having trouble getting into the painting zone lately, and I had trouble today even though I was excited to be out.  These two are not really great paintings... but I read the other day on Wet Canvas that even some professional plein air painters admit a good percentage of the work they do in the field isn't great.  Plein air painting sure is hard.

I used the palette I'll be using for my upcoming plein air workshop on the 21st:  Alizarin crimson, Cadmium red light, Indian yellow, Cadmium yellow light, French Ultramarine, and Maganese Blue.  Oh, and white.  I am having trouble mixing my darkest values with this palette- they all come out looking like really dark purple or some sort of indefinable brown.

My setup for the first painting:

#33, 8x10 oil on panel  ( I really have trouble with pine trees) one hour

For the second painting, I found a tree that was literally growing out of a huge rock.  I thought I had a good start with this one but am not quite sure what happened.

6x8 oil on panel one hour, maybe I spent too long on it.  Oh well, next time.

Plein Air 32

We spent the day in Central Park and had a wonderful time. I did a little painting while Daya played in the grass.

For today's painting I used 2 new colors- Indian Yellow and Maganese blue. I like them very, very much but also think the addition of cadmium yellow would have made more variations in the greens.  I was really trying to go for masses and impression over details.

Alizarin crimson, Indian yellow, Maganese blue, French Ultramarine, and Titanium white.

6x8 oil on panel

Daya got her face painted:

Retro or Antique?

I've been goofing off with oil paint this week... .  Here is a copied image from 1992...anyone out there recognize it?
Next week I'll get back to serious study (maybe ;) ) and plein air.

8x10 oil on panel

Note: I am sure the original source image is still under copyright by Sierra Online.

WN Titanium White

I can't believe I haven't painted in three weeks! (I don't count last weekend... it wasn't oil paint! :) )

I am a little rusty...

This is another in the Paint Tube series... WN Titanium White
6x8 oil on panel, maybe 35 minutes or so.