Mother's Day and Springtime Rites

Things have gotten busy in the past few weeks, and it's been nearly impossible to get back into the studio. That doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking about art and making plans. I'm still pondering, for instance, what to do about the background for Bard's portrait and how to fix his muzzle area which is still bothering me. I did some experimenting in Photoshop and think I have a plan for the next time I sit down to paint him, though, so that's progress, even if it isn't visible.

Last weekend I drove down to Ann Arbor to visit my mother in her nursing home for Mother's Day. I got in a nice visit with my daughter as well who took me out to dinner on Saturday night. We went to an Italian restaurant on Main Street and had delicious Lasagna made from all fresh ingredients. I don't remember the name; Pinalo's or something like that. But I do remember that the building used to house the Quality Bakery when I was growing up; one of the best bakeries in Ann Arbor. They had absolutely yummy molasses cookies that my mother would buy occasionally.

Ann Arbor has changed a lot since we moved "up north" 37 years ago, but I'm glad that my daughter loves it there and that I can visit her periodically and take trips down Memory Lane. A2, as we natives call it, offers her a lot more opportunities for the things she's interested in than northern Michigan does. I just wish that she'd find a nice boy and get married. She's 32, by the way.

The drive home on Monday was a delight. Maybe thanks to high gas prices, the traffic was unusually light for a weekday, especially the truck traffic between Flint and A2 which is usually the worst section of the drive. And the road construction barely slowed anyone down now that MDOT has a new system for construction zones. We have a saying here; Michigan has two seasons; Winter and Road Construction. As soon as the snow is gone, out come the construction barrels and signs which remain until the snow flies again.

After leaving the flatlands around Saginaw/Bay City and south, I headed into the hill country and spent a lot of time observing the colors of the landscape made by the various species of trees and underbrush as they leafed out. There was a surprising variety ranging from the usual lime greens to beiges, soft oranges and muted reds, punctuated here and there by trees full of white blossoms. Cresting the tops of hills presented me with vistas of more hills receding into the distance and gave me more painting data to store away in my memory banks for future paintings.

Much as I would have liked to, I couldn't sit down and paint these scenes when I got home. As usual, I hit the ground running to catch up on laundry, bills, paperwork and other duties. And now there's the yard and flower beds to deal with. Most of one day was spent in raking the last of the leaves out of the beds, cutting back perennials that hadn't been cut in the fall, pruning broken or dead branches and various other Spring gardening chores. It's time to make plans for this year's projects and head for the nurseries for new shrubs and flowers! That's almost as exciting as visiting an art supply store.

Since I don't have any new art to share with you, today's first image is one from Mother Nature. These are my Chorus LIne daylilies from last summer; the ones that the deer didn't eat. If I paint these, I think I'll title it "Captive Beauty".

The second image is of the flower beds I built last summer with our fountain installed as the focal point. This makes a lovely spot to sit and look out onto the yard and flower beds while enjoying the cool shade of the large Beech tree on a hot, sunny day. It won't be long now before those days will be back, frost warnings not withstanding!

Bard The Beautiful

Well, I couldn't very well leave poor Bard in that ugly stage for very long, so here you see him with his first coat of "real" color, or "local color" as we artists say. Where that phrase came from I have no idea. It doesn't seem to make sense in this day and age, but maybe it did decades or centuries ago.

At any rate, having learned my lesson from the last painting session on the Belgian painting, I started out by oiling out the canvas with linseed oil and then wiping off as much as I could, leaving just a thin coating. The paint went on much more smoothly this time, and I progressed in good time, spending five hours on Bard yesterday to get to this point. I was so happy to have spent so much time doing the value study and then the underpainting because both served as guides as I added the color, highlights and shadows. Now Bard will be set aside to dry for at least a week while I study him some more and plan how to proceed and what changes to make in the next layer of color.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to change and head for the barn to ride my own red horse before the thunderstorms hit that are predicted for today.

Going Green with The Green Team - Belgians

On Friday I had what seemed like a somewhat panicky email from Mary at Horses In Art magazine wondering if I would "please" join the Equine Art Guild group ad in the summer issue since they had only three artists signed up. That issue will be going to The Draft Horse Classic in the fall, so I did a little quick mental figuring and decided that I could use The Green Team for the ad, even though it's not finished, and it would be appropriate for a show of all draft horses. The images in those ads are fairly small after all.

Yesterday morning I was supposed to go riding, visit with my barn friends and then come home to work on "the boys". Didn't happen. The arthritis had really kicked up, and I was hurting a lot. I had worried all night about our cat, Annie, because she hadn't seemed to feel well for the past couple of days. She has digestive system problems, and I wondered if she was taking a turn for the worse and wondered if I should take her to the vet. In the end, I decided to stay home, keep an eye on Annie, and catch up on some reading time after taking an Aleve. The thought of sitting on a moving horse or sitting at the easel held no appeal whatsoever.

By today, the pain had pretty much subsided, but time was short, so instead of laying on a heavier layer of paint, I opted to glaze green over the blue trailer in an attempt to build up some luminosity and depth of color. This time, remembering my difficulties with the Bard portrait a few days ago, I oiled out the canvas first, and the paint went on really smoothly.

After that, I set up the camera on a tripod, shot the painting and adjusted it in Photoshop. Just to be sure, I printed out the image in a nice big size with my Epson 2200 printer and was very pleased with the results. The image is now ready to send to Mary by tomorrow which is the deadline she gave me.

And, just in case you're wondering, Annie seems to be fine now. In fact, she stole a piece of cheese from my dinner not once but twice while I was watching 60 Minutes! It's a good thing that she's very lovable and cute!

Poor Bard Gets Ugly

The good news is that I was able to finish the underpainting stage of Bard's portrait yesterday. The bad news is that it's in the Ugly stage, as we artists call it. Every work of art seems to go through this stage at some point in its creation, so I'm not too concerned.

I did have some problems, however, getting the paint to go on the canvas smoothly. It just wouldn't happen, and I don't remember having that problem with the Belgian painting. But, then again, I did that underpainting so long ago that it's nothing more than a dim memory. This stage will be covered over with layers of paint, and the roughness will disappear as the layers build up, resulting in a glossy coated look for our boy, The Peppermint Kid.

And now that Spring is here and the horses are pretty well shed out, I can always run out to the barn with the painting if I need to check something, like accurate coat color. That could be risky, though, since no doubt his pasture mate, Cory, will be right in my face with nose to the canvas checking it out. And Bard will be looking for peppermints!

On second thought, maybe it would be safer to take a few tubes of paint or colored pencils and just do a quick sketch from outside the fence. Yeah, that'll work!

Gardening Season Arrives

Try as I might, I haven't been able to make much progress with Bard this week so far.

Over the weekend, I spent some time in the yard raking leaves and debris out of the flower beds and generally checking things over. The perennials are coming up rapidly now, so time was of the essence to prevent damaging tender young shoots. My husband also got out the gardening wagons for hauling things around and also some old fence that we didn't get down last fall. I'll use it to fence off the rest of the shrubs before the deer can munch off the new shoots and "prune" them in very undesirable ways.

My neighbor told me that the big doe which has been hanging around the area the past few years was hit by a car last winter. I confess that I secretly celebrated this fact since it meant that she would not be back to ravage my yard and steal our apples this year. I'm sorry that she had to suffer, but that's as far as it goes. Just call me heartless. She and her two yearling fawns did a lot of damage last year. So far, the two fawns have not shown up, but I'm taking no chances.

Then on Sunday I was hit by a spammer who used my email address to send out what must have been hundreds of thousands of spam emails. Over two thousand delivery failure notices were in my inbox Sunday morning, and close to another two thousand arrived during the day! It took a lot of time to go through all of them and delete them, call my web host to see if anything could be done about it (it can't) and generally obsess over how long this would go on. But, thankfully, by Monday morning the onslaught had waned and things are now back to normal. In my opinion, an exception should be made for the use of waterboarding for spammers who are caught.

And, yesterday I put the apple blossom painting back on the easel for one last time and painted the grass a lighter shade. I'm not quite sure that it's an improvement, but instinct tells me that I'd better not fuss with this painting again or it will go south in a hurry. There is definitely such a thing as too many tweaks when it comes to art as we artists are all aware.

I did manage to paint Bard's ears last night but didn't get any further.

Today was chopped up by this and that, but tomorrow I'm dedicating the whole day to studio time. Then I'll have art to show again.

The image above is of one of our forsythia shrubs which is now in bloom. Believe it or not, it's the best of the three and shows the results of deer pruning by its uneven shape. Ugly or not, the fences are staying around the shrubs until they get big enough that the deer can't damage them too badly. From a distance, you can't see them at all!

Back To The Bard

Yesterday I couldn't help myself and did work a little more on the apple blossoms painting to correct a couple of things that were still bothering me. Now I'm satisfied with it and even more satisfied that I was able to take a sharper photo of it. If you go back to the last blog entry and click on the thumbnail, you'll see the finally finished version in sharper detail and better color. Even so, there is much more detail in those blossoms than you can see here. It's one of those that has to be seen in person to fully appreciate.

So, today my art project du jour was getting back to Bard's portrait. Several days ago I toned a new canvas, and since it was dry enough to work on, I traced the image onto the canvas and then went over the lines with some paint to make sure that they don't get rubbed off or smudged. It was a small but important step. On Monday I'll do the value under painting that will be the backbone, so to speak, of the painting, and I will use my drawing as a guide for where all the lights and darks go. This is absolutely critical in the process of making the painting look like Bard and not just an oil painting of any Quarter Horse.

Tomorrow I need to work on filing those insurance papers because the accountant will be calling on Monday to discuss our financial situation. That means switching from right brain mode to left brain mode.

Bah! Humbug!

"Apple Blossom Time" Finished

After some revisions this morning, I signed this painting and am calling it finished. Some paintings are just not worth spending a lot of time revising, and this is one of them. I learn something new with every painting, and this one has helped me get back into the habit of painting regularly again.

It's nice to cross it off the Paintings To Finish list and go on to the next one. But first I get to order some new oils because some of my tubes have gotten very old and stiff and difficult to work with. That gives me a chance to try some different brands which is something to look forward to.

Bard and the Belgians are up next on the schedule, and I will tackle them while waiting for the new paints to arrive.