Much Ado About Vance

Second post! These are sketches I did last September during an out-door production of Much Ado About Nothing in Cannon Beach. One of the most fun plays I've ever attended. In slow moments at work and while waiting for this and that I've been "hand-tipping" them because the sketchbook I used has a really heavy-weight paper. Perfect for my travel paints which are always in my purse. The first is probably Leonato, and the second is Benedick in his masquerade chicken mask. The last is Vance during a concert. Love those converse.

Magwyn and Dragwen

Okay, two posts here with multiple pictures. Most of these have been taken with my phone and "fixed" in photoshop, so bear with the result. Sketches! The first is Maggie listening intently to the recorded track to which she was playing her bodhran the day she and I did recording for Hank Cramer in Fife. Lots and lots of fun. The second is a way-cool dragon-man hybrid my art class and I developed as an anatomy/imagination experiment. Cause and effect: what happens when you cross a reptile with a human? I really liked the result.
#2 pencil on computer paper.

Katie's World

Haven't been posting nearly as much as I should, but this one deserves it. My dear little Katie has been a student of mine for two and a half years and today was her last class with me. As a good-bye present I painted her as she painted, dropping in behind her all her favorite things to paint from over the years: daffodils, her nieces and nephews, trees. She's gotten so good. You'll see the picture she was working on today on the table in front of her. This is from my phone, so it's not brilliant, but it will have to do.

Left-handed drawing, right-handed painting.

Darte

I apologize for the less than stellar quality of this photo-- I used my phone. This is Darte, the creature who lives under my coffee shop. The only part of him visible to the common observe is his back fur. This looks extraordinarily like grass, and would be mistaken as such on Google Earth. I painted him one slow shift when the wind was being particularly frisky and his fur was rippling gloriously. Thankfully he doesn't mind having it cut. You can find out more about him from the text on the painting. ☺

The Latest

Last week I was at some friends' watching their darling children. They have a stunning view of Mt. Rainier, as you will see from the photograph, and I couldn't help painting it as the sun set. All the light was shifting, so I had to catch it as I could, but I like the result. Then, the oldest and I had a deal: I would paint him and then he would paint me. My picture is below, and I wish I had his. Isn't that monster truck great?! It's definitely the first one I've done. ☺

My favorite part of our deal was that when he was posing me so he could sketch he wondered aloud how I should sit. "I know!" he answered his own question, "You can draw!" So he sketched me with a marker in my hand. ☺ Made my (very early) morning.

Written-up!

Here's something fun! Chelsea did a write-up on the painting I did for them (Lucy, below) on her excellent blog, which can be found here.

Lucy

Yea!!! I can finally post the project that has occupied a great deal of my artistic time lately. Chelsea, a school mate from Ecola, commissioned me to paint two portraits of her daughters. This is the first of Lucy. They live on a ranch in Eastern Oregon, and I truly enjoyed capturing that is this image. I tried to tell the story of Lucy more than render her precisely and I was pretty happy with the result. There is something delightful about children and puddles. The best part, of course, was that Chelsea likes it. ☺