A Whole Lotta Tweaking Going On!

So much for best laid plans.

Despite my best intentions, and because of some necessary business phone calls, I was not able to progress to Bard's neck and shoulder today. However, I did spend the whole painting time tweaking here and there, correcting and adding more highlights and also his forelock. The good news is that I'm calling the head finished. I've reached that point where my artist intuition tells me that if I tweak anymore, I'll just muck things up.

I'm quite disappointed that I wasn't able to get farther today, but the hardest part is at least done, and next week I'll have plenty of time to continue. I was momentarily tempted to just keep painting until late evening, but that would have meant postponing the packing until tomorrow and that would have delayed my departure for Atlanta until way too late. Besides, it's not a good idea to paint when tired. It can be decidedly counter productive. So, Bard will just have to wait until next week.

You should be able to see a bigger difference today. Adding the forelock changed his look quite a bit. His forelock always seems to be a bit disheveled, so that's how I painted it.

Again, you can click on the image above to see a nice large version on my website.

The Peppermint Kid Update

There was no progress on Bard yesterday due to an allergy attack that leveled me for the day and required an afternoon nap; something I never do unless I'm sick or exhausted. Cleaning out closets and drawers brought it on due to all the dust stirred up.

But, today was another story. After a run to Traverse City for an appointment and a stop at the Goodwill to drop off former closet inhabitants, I was able to get in an hour of painting before dinnertime. Click on the image above to see a larger version of today's progress on my website.

I was quite happy with today's progress. As you can see, Bard now has a real eye. I also did some more resculpting of his face and added some lighter highlights. They will need another application to bring them up even more, but they're good for now and serve as a guide for the final touches. They were mostly dry brushed on which proved to be too subtle, so next time the application will be heavier.

Tomorrow I plan to paint most of the day and hope to have Bard pretty much finished before we head for Deer Camp on Friday. By the time we return, he'll be dry enough for the final touches and a final background layer.

Today's photo was again taken using the easel light, so the lighting isn't even and has washed out the upper half. Perhaps I can get a better one tomorrow.

The Peppermint Kid Again

Last week was one of those weeks when you meet yourself coming and going.

I gathered together note cards and prints to take to the gallery, wrapped and inventoried them and rushed up there just before closing time on Thursday so that she would have them for the weekend. I did get another print colored but didn't have time to scan it, so you'll just have to wait until I color another one to see how they look. It did look nice, and I hope it sells - and quickly, too!

Attempts to print more business cards were nothing short of frustrating and were not successful. The images in the new software were all pixelly, so I gave up on that until later.

On another day, I had my teeth cleaned, got my overdue allergy shots and took the board check to the barn. No visit or grooming this time since I was in good clothes, didn't have my knee brace on, and the horses were wayyyy at the far end of the pasture and down the steep hill.

Tuesday was taken up with standing in line to vote and watching the election coverage and returns. "We" won, but really the whole country won because now we can go forward under new leadership and new ideas.

Did I mention a haircut fit in somewhere?

There were also last minute preparations for the meeting with our financial guru, laundry, groceries and preparations for our trip to Ann Arbor to see my mother in the nursing home and our daughter who has a new job. After the financial meeting on Friday, we said good bye to the cats and headed south. Fortunately, we had good driving and a good visit because on Sunday it started snowing. Monday morning we awoke to snow on the ground, our first of the season, and the definite look and feel of winter in the air.

Putting all that behind me, I got back to work on Bard, aka The Peppermint Kid, yesterday and made some progress. He may not look very different, but take my word for it; the red is toned down. I found a recipe for "his" color in a book and found that it worked quite well. By mixing cadmium orange and viridian green, I got a nice yellowish brown tone. By adding in some cadmium yellow light and raw umber and white, I had all the highlights and shadows I needed and managed to redo his face by bedtime. I remodelled parts of his profile, made the eye smaller and the cheek fuller and think that he now looks more like the real version. His head still needs more work, and I'd like to finish his eye today before proceeding to the neck.

Over all, I'm pleased with the progress and hope to finish Bard up this week or next at the latest.

Plan Ahead!!

Something about Bard's painting has been nagging at me, and I've been reluctant to continue with it until figuring out just what. I knew his head was not quite right but couldn't put my finger on just where it was wrong until I printed out some of the reference photos last weekend. In studying them for what must have been the 24th time, I noticed for the first time that he has a dip and then a convex curve to his nasal bone. "That's it!" I shouted to myself. It was a Eureka! moment. In comparing the painting to those photos, the difference was at last visible.

The other thing that's been bothering me is a nagging feeling that the color in the photos wasn't accurate, so on Thursday I took my prints to the barn and compared them to the real Bard. Yup, they are way too red. Bard is more of a dun color without dun factors, which means that his coat is more brassy and gold than red and orange. Boy, was I glad then that I hadn't continued with the painting, because it would have meant painting him all over again!

Of course I should have planned ahead, printed out those photos sooner and taken them to the barn months ago. But I didn't for a variety of reasons that we need not reveal here. It's best not to go there. Now that I have things figured out, I'm eager to get to painting again, but the next few weeks are really chopped up with appointments, meetings and a trip to Ann Arbor. I've resigned myself to the idea that I'm just going to have to paint in little bits of time whenever I can fit it in and not worry about paint drying too fast or any of that. Bard has been on the back burner far too long as it is. He needs to be finished and out the door so that I can get back to other artwork and finally have some new finished works to put up for sale.

Speaking of which, sales this year have been particularly dismal what with the economy problems and all. It's been quite a long time since I took any prints or note cards up to the gallery in Central Lake which was pretty much out of all of my work, so yesterday I gathered some prints and note cards and then did something I haven't done for several years. Back when I was doing booth shows, I hand colored some of my early black and white prints, and they sold really well. It occured to me that now might be a good time to try that again. Above you can see the results of a hand colored version of my print, "Gotta Scratch". It took me about an hour to layer on the colors with colored pencils while watching TV, and I plan to do many more of these for holiday sales for the gallery and for my website.

In the past I hand colored another older print which also sold well. When I get one done, I'll show that one to you, too. We artists are doing anything we can think of to offer something new yet inexpensive to our collectors in these dismal economic times when everyone is cutting back and waiting to see what the future brings. This is definitely something I can do until I have new paintings to offer. The hand colored prints will be offered at a slightly higher price and offer something that is one of a kind for a very attractive price.

Hopefully, it's a win-win for artist and collector and a good plan for the days ahead.

Fall Photo Shoot

On my walk around the pond I captured these scenes and many more inspiring ones. Here is the pond in early morning light. It's grown up a lot around the edges, the water has dropped and the fish are gone, but it still is a lovely place at any time of year. At one time it was clean enough to swim in, but not anymore.

Some of the most striking scenes I captured were backlighted, like these maples along the edge of the driveway and pond. But, even when the clouds came over, the trees still seemed to glow, like the maples below. I could see them from the kitchen window and from the family room and enjoyed them all weekend long.


The little town of Atlanta nearby is about as small town as you can get and still be called a town. I remember one year we took the kids to see the Fourth of July parade down the main street. It consisted of a few floats, some 4H kids on horses and the high school marching band. The band had no uniforms, and the parade was so short that they went by, turned around and came by again! In the past thirty years, it hasn't grown much of any, but at least there's a nice grocery store now and a much better fair grounds than our county has!

A Weekend Getaway

We spent a long weekend at our family getaway near Atlanta, Michigan this past weekend, but before we left, I caught site of the scene above from my studio window. Five swans came out of the early morning mist, the sun shining on them like specters of the lake. They spotted me in the window and immediately swam over looking for a handout, which I know better than to provide.

After loading up and saying goodbye to the cats, we headed for Atlanta on another spectacular day of warm sunshine and fall colors. Saturday dawned sunny, warm and still so I took a walk around the pond with my camera and captured as much as I could for memories and paintings to come.

My parents-in-law bought this property in the 50's for hunting, but the family gathered here frequently over the years for holidays and snowmobiling, and eventually the folks retired here. We spent our honeymoon here and used to take long walks in the woods before kids, so it has a very special place in my heart.


When they first bought the property, this is the shack that the folks, my husband and his brother stayed in when they came up to plant and tend the hundreds of tiny pine trees that were planted on the bare hills. A pond was dug and stocked with fish, and not too many years later, a mobile home replaced the shack. It was added to over the years to accommodate the growing family of wives and grandchildren.


The years have since taken their toll on the old shack whose additions have now fallen down or caved in. It has a melancholy look now as if it holds memories of much better days and people whom we can only wonder about. Such abandoned shacks are pretty common around the northern Michigan woods, and one always wonders what stories they could tell about their former inhabitants. Now they are left to the skunks, raccoons and other wild creatures who find bits of shelter in their dilapidated ruins.

Remembering Bo

We are having absolutely spectacular fall weather here in northwest lower Michigan; warm, sunny days and cool nights which have brought out equally spectacular fall colors. We are nowhere near peak color yet, but it's a good color year with the brilliant oranges and reds of the maples contrasted against the dark evergreens and golden yellows of our beech trees and poplars. It's been a bumper year for beechnuts, so the squirrels are again busy bounding about in our yard gathering their harvest for the winter.

Thankfully, we have no apples, so that means no deer to browse on my perennials and shrubs. On the other hand, that also means no apples for us, which means I had to buy some for the first time in three years!

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the house looking out while continuing to work on gathering financial information for our advisor guy; made all the more urgent by the financial crisis in our world. Ugh! I've been adding up our monthly expenses and wondering how everything got so much more expensive so quickly.

In spite of also nursing a sore throat and headache, I did manage to get outside yesterday to give my car a very overdue interior cleaning. I felt a little sad while doing it because I was washing the last of Bo's muddy paw prints off the back seat and vacuuming up his hairs from the cargo area. We lost him two years ago this month, and yes, it's been that long since the car had a good cleaning!


I still miss Bo. I remember the joy this small Lab mix pooch brought to the family for nearly 16 years after we rescued him on a freezing December night from a household that had banished him to the yard with no shelter from the cold and wind and very little human contact. We were just going to take a look at him that night in response to the ad in the paper, but when my husband saw the conditions he was living in; tied to a tree and shivering; there was no way he was going to let that dog spend another cold and miserable night in that place. Bo eagerly hopped in our car with not even a look back as our kids showered him with attention.

In the first 24 hours we had him, he had to be shoved out the door to go potty because he was so afraid that he couldn't come back in. We got him as a companion for our German Shepherd, and they bonded immediately. Bo thought he was in Heaven and showed us every day how grateful he was. He and Daisy became best friends and spent hours playing in the big dog yard until Daisy became too old and crippled to enjoy the rough housing.

Bo had a habit of tuning you out when his attention was focused on something. If he got loose, he would take off on a dead run out the gate and into the road. Most likely it was this propensity that caused him to end up a stray on the doorstep of the family that took him in, so one of his nicknames became Hobo Joe. More often we called him Bobo. We could never trust him to be on the loose, but around the house he wanted nothing more than to be at your side - or Daisy's.

Bo never did get over his dislike of the cold or isolation, and after Daisy died he became strictly an inside dog.

Well, now I've digressed. The two photos at the top are views from my studio. Our lake is quite narrow and long, and on a still morning like this one, the fall colors are reflected in the water, adding to the brilliance of the scene. I love the view from my studio window, and one of these days I'm going to paint it.

Speaking of the studio, poor Bard is languishing on the easel as I work on these financial figures. It will take two or three days in a row that I can dedicate to painting in order to finish him up, and so far I haven't been able to put them together. I'm determined to finish him by month's end, however.