Garlic

Oil on gessobord, 6x6" NFS

Right now I'm taking a drawing class at a little school called The Atelier in Minneapolis. The style of drawing and painting is Classical Realism, and getting a likeness is not the goal. It has to be perfect. At the end of the 10 week class, I will be lucky if I complete one drawing. So the pace is a little frustrating to me, though I think it will be a very good learning experience and the work that people create is truly amazing. This painting ended up much looser than a lot of other paintings I have done. But I like the simplicity of it. Perhaps it's a reaction to the very precise drawing that I'm doing in class!

Nature Journaling

This winter, I took a class through the arboretum at the school where I work. The class was called Nature Journaling and it was about using drawing and painting to record notes about plants and critters that you find in nature. It was neat because we learned about the things we were drawing and painting, such as what the shape of a bird's beak tells you about what it eats. We worked from plants and taxidermized animals and used pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor. I am a few months overdue in posting these, but here are some images:

The acorn from a red oak. Pen and ink.


To practice simplifying flower shapes, we first drew a daisy made from a paper plate that we stuck onto a twig. I decided to include the push pin. Pencil.


This butterfly was from the day we focused on bugs. Pencil.


This beetle was probably 3 inches long and very shiny. Watercolor.


A taxidermized grosbeak. Pencil.


A blue jay. Watercolor.


For the final class, we went to the natural history "museum" in the biology department, where they had a ton of taxidermized animals, many of which had been processed by monks a hundred years ago. This eagle looked so noble sitting atop his perch I had to draw him. Pen and ink.


The bohemian waxwing was also in the natural history museum. Pen and ink.

Mona Lisa

oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

In Renaissance days (and today), recreating old masterpieces was a common way of learning to paint.  This is the final holdover from the Renaissance class I took a year ago, and it's the only one painted in the Italian Renaissance style.  The Italian Renaissance style isn't much different than the Dutch Renaissance style, well, at least not in how they built layers of paint.  The Dutch masters started with burnt sienna or a similar red-brown layer and built from there.  The Italians started with a green layer.  That's it.  

I haven't decided if this is entirely finished or not.  Then again, they say Leonardo kept dabbling at the original for a span of 20 years or more.  So I suppose I've got some time to make up my mind.

Here she is after the second layer went down--you can see the first green underpainting, a glaze of cerulean blue over the background, a glaze of fleshtones in the face, and white egg tempera on all the light spots.  

Chubs for Luck

oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

The first night of our honeymoon in Hawaii, we ate at an outdoor restaurant that was surrounded by chubby little statues just like this guy.  I took about a million photos on the trip--but I snapped a shot of this statue because I thought he could make a good painting.  I started this painting when we were still in Boston and I was taking the Renaissance painting class.  Now, almost a year later, I have finally finished it.  

If you wonder why I have done so little painting since we got here, here's one reason.  Someone doesn't like it when I paint because it means I'm not playing fetch with him.  So he climbs up on the sofa that backs up to the half-wall that separates my studio from the family room, hangs his feet over the wall just like this, and drops his ball into the studio.  He then barks and whimpers until I pick up the ball and throw it for him.  Then, he climbs back on the sofa to do it all again!  It's quite an exciting and unpredictable game, but it's hard to resist that fuzzy little face.

What's the cone for?  Well, to save money, a friend offered to groom him for us.  The nearly $300 vet bill that resulted from Hero getting his ear cut with the scissors really taught us that some things are better left to professionals.  He got his stitches out and the cone off today, and immediately got a professional haircut for $40 (which, it turns out, is a lot less than $300).