Alizarine

Daughter Mother Father

My newest painting has off-the-charts sentimental value for me because it's my mother's jewelry. Mom has had the same jewelry box for decades, and one of my favorite pastimes as a girl was to open it up and look at her pins, necklaces, and earrings. In the top right corner is a spectacular pin that used to belong to Grandma Bradshaw. It's the sparkliest thing I've ever tried to paint, and the stones have a shimmery rainbow appearance that were just so watercolory. And then in the lower right corner is an opened heart-shaped locket. Inside are black and white newspaper photos of a teenage Mom and Dad--she put those in there when she was 14! 

The title for this one is Daughter Mother Father because the cameo pin appears to be kissing the locket, and its face and hair looks almost exactly like mine in my self-portrait from years ago. I'm so grateful to have such wonderful, supportive parents, and I love them very much.

I took dozens of photos of Mom's jewelry (and also some of my sister's makeup and jewelry) over the 4th of July weekend. The family converged on Poof and Tyler's house, and Poof took a couple of photos of me constructing one of my crazy little still-life setups in her office. Jeff came in and provided a much-needed extra set of hands and general cuteness. Don't know what I'd do without you, Jeff!

Soon enough, it was time to get to work on this 16"x20" painting. I started with a purplish rose pin before moving on to a silver rose earring that always looked uncomfortable with its pointy leaves and screw-in back (but worth it because it's so fancy). Then I began a red bead necklace that Mom used to let me wear when I was little, followed by a cameo pin.

Two painting sessions later: my parents were inside the gold locket, and I added a few more beads. Everything about the locket was difficult. The photos inside were (a) miniscule, (b) blurry, and (c) newspaper halftone quality, i.e. made with a series of dots. I thought about painting with dots but nixed the idea because the faces were so small and I am a human being, damn it!

Interestingly, Mom's side of the locket is at an angle, and the foreshortening involved meant that Mom's face would be slimmer than if I had painted it straight on, if that makes sense. As I painted her 1-inch face at an angle, I was surprised by how closely she resembles her granddaughter Ashley.

The photos were cut out with scissors over 50 years ago--each has slightly irregular edges that I included here. The locket itself is reflecting nearby red beads, and 90% of its colors posed complicated mixing problems. Needless to say, I was glad when this part was finished!

And then as is so often the case with me, I disappeared for a week or so, put my nose to the grindstone, and finished the thing without taking photos. I needed to wrap this up before the end of July. I saved Grandma Bradshaw's extrasparkly pin for last, and it took DAYS to finish. I'm so happy with the end result, but its complexity really tried my patience, and the looming deadline made it worse. Now that I've scanned and framed it, I can finally get going on the many little things that a person must do during the days before an art show: making lists, framing, writing title cards, and on and on. BUT AT LEAST THIS IS DONE AND I AM FREE!

Prints of Daughter Mother Father are available now!

Information about my Decatur show is here! If you're in central Illinois, I hope you can attend my opening reception on August 9. My fabulous sister will be there along with beloved family members and supercool friends!

Kelly's Lips

As promised/threatened, I've put together another facial features tutorial. This one deals with a mouth, obviously, and it's mine. Wanting to paint glossy, slightly parted bright lips, I contacted Tyler and Natalie earlier this week to see if they had any just lying around. They didn't--strangely, all of their female photography subjects seem to opt for matte or nude lips. And I didn't want to bother my sister, who is the queen of the bright, glossy lip. She's already done so much for me regarding the start-up of this YouTube channel, and anyway I have big plans for her later on in this series.

But I have a camera, and I've been told that I have a pretty mouth once or twice.

   

I put on the lipstick color that is currently defining my summer (Estee Lauder's All-Day Lipstick in Rich and Rosy). Surrounded by three skeptical cats and feeling incredibly stupid, I took a bunch of mouth-selfies by the living room windows. After a few dozen attempts, I settled on the one photo that didn't make me look like a complete mouth-breather and set to work painting it the next day.

This painting was a bit smaller than last week's eye and only took 90 minutes to paint, including a bit of drying time. Taking the advice of Poof and a couple of other people, I broke down and made an actual appearance with my face and everything at the beginning (please note the squirrel outside my window), and I recorded an audio narration to accompany the video. Therefore you will hear my voice in this one. You will hear my voice a whole lot. And let's see a show of hands: how many people are creeped out by the sound of their recorded voices?

ALL OF US.

Ho boy. Here we go. Please put this thing on mute if you can't take it, but make sure you watch until the end because you will see Bun luxuriating in the summer sun, belly pointed skyward. Video MVP.

 

Oh, and would you like my big fat mouth on your walls? No need to feel weird. Click this.

Programming note: I am going to be very busy this week preparing for my show at the Decatur Area Arts Council! Read about that here, and wish Jeff and me luck in transporting 36 paintings from our house to the gallery on Thursday.

Cassidy's Eye

Earlier this week I took some time off from my regularly-scheduled painting frenzy to work on a quick painting tutorial for my YouTube channel. It's the first in a series that will show you how I paint various facial features, and I will break them down one at a time, starting with eyes.

This is how I learned to draw and paint realistically when I was 14, and this was how I taught my students. In fact, a simpler version of what you see above was what we did on the first day of school every year. I think beginners are intimidated by drawing an entire face--there's just so much going on--and reducing what they are looking at into bite-sized pieces gives them confidence. Then they'll have an easier time putting it all together.

The reference photo I used for this tutorial is from my cousin Tyler and soon-to-be cousin in-law Natalie. Together they are Sharpe & Walker Photography, and they are marvelous. I urge you to check out their website. Just look at this portfolio of photos from a wedding of two people you don't even know and try not to cry. I dare you. Everything on their site is inventive and beautiful. And just look at how adorable they are.

I messaged Natalie and asked if she had an example of a blue or green eye that I could paint, please please please (they're a little more challenging than brown eyes--otherwise I'd use my own or Jeff's). She immediately knew exactly what I was looking for. She zapped an incredible blue-green eye over to an ecstatic me. The model's name is Cassidy, and Tyler and Natalie took a series of magic-hour photos of her earlier this month. I love how the golden sunlight hit her eyelashes, and while I knew that capturing this effect would be challenging, I think it makes this eye special.

Yesterday Jeff and I spent the entire day editing the video and adding captions--it's harder than you might think--and here it is for you to enjoy! Please subscribe to my channel and share this with your pals. Warning: you will hear my voice for about 15 seconds as I introduce the video. But then I go away, don't worry.

 

Thanks for watching!

If you're interested, prints of this eye in a variety of sizes and formats are available here!

Decatur Area Arts Council Show

I'm getting excited about my big show in Decatur...just a few more weeks! My current project (a painting of my mother's jewelry) is way ahead of schedule, and other than a couple of framing problems, I feel like the show is in good shape.

I'm planning to show 36 paintings, many of them for sale and many never before seen. The opening reception is Friday, August 9, from 5-7 pm. It's at the Decatur Area Arts Council (125 N Water St., Decatur, Illinois) which is between Champaign and Springfield. The gallery is beautiful and modern, and I've been dying to put my paintings on its walls since I applied for this show back in January.

If you're in the area and would like to see my paintings in a non-digital, real-life format, please consider this your invitation to attend my reception! Meet Jeff and my parents and maybe even my superstar sister! Or just take a look at the show between August 7th through the 31st. Click here for more information on the show and when the DAAC is open. It's open most of the time.

I've made a Facebook page for the event--please take a look and RSVP if you'd like. Thanks!

Also watch this space for information about a couple of workshops I'll be presenting at the DAAC in October. One's for kids and one's for adults. :)

Okay, back to work!

Winged Nativity

This is my first Christmas painting! It's a 10.5"x13.5" still-life of a handful of bird tree ornaments. We have quite a few, and I like how they are kind of seasonless. I wanted to create a holiday painting that would be tolerable year-round, and I ended up with something that can be interpreted as a secular or religious image. More on that in a bit. Here's how it came together.

These birds have a variety of textures, from the feathery peacocks and hummingbird, which at the time Jeff insisted looked furious, to the cardinal that's made of some kind of straw-like fiber, to the puffy white bird that's covered with sleet and glitter, to the T-1000-looking crystal bird in the center. It's the only bird above that was truly finished. I had extra stuff to add to the rest of them, but I was suprised by how quickly the picture was progressing after a few days' work. During this time, Jeff and I made a video for my BRAND NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL!

Yes. I've decided to follow in my sister's massive, canyon-like footsteps and am giving YouTube a shot! The channel is called "Art Food Kitty" and will cover things like arts, foods, and kitties. It's a video version of this blog, and I'll show art demonstrations and sped-up paintings, favorite recipes (once we get the lighting in the kitchen figured out and stop hating the way we look and sound on camera), and plenty of gratuitous shots of our darling cats. Jeff and I are excited about this and it's currently occupying a lot of brain space. I've already had YouTube dreams/nightmares every night this week. Wheeee!

Our first video is embedded at the bottom of this post. But please read the next couple of paragraphs. I'll make it brief!

Moving right along: a couple of days ago I added a sparkly star near the center and a glittery pine cone under the hummingbird. Along the bottom: some greenery I pulled off one of our trees and arranged on top of a red Christmas stocking. Also in there: a blue light. At his point the stocking still needed work--I had to add shadows on the flat areas near the right side.

This watercolor is already in a frame! I'm calling it Winged Nativity because as I mentioned earlier, this painting can be interpreted as secular or religious. On the surface, this is a grouping of cute birds on some greenery, a red stocking, and some aluminum foil. But if you want to dig deeper, it's a non-traditional nativity scene. The white bird and cardinal are Mary and Joseph (note their gold cord halos). The otherworldly crystal bird is the baby Jesus. He is tucked under a star, wears a glittery crown, and beneath him is a light. The hummingbird offers him a golden pine cone, and the two other kings are peacocks. (Perhaps they have misplaced their frankincense and myrrh and are looking for it.)

Would you like a print? You can absolutely get it as a print! Click this thing!

Buy your holiday cards now! It's Christmas in July! They're blank inside!

BIG cards are here.    Little cards are here!

And now, I'd like to begin the very soft, very slow roll-out of Art Food Kitty. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE and watch this channel evolve! Will it ever get better? Will I figure out how to paint without my frizzy hair getting in the way of the camera (sorry about that)? Will our marriage implode over the inevitable artistic differences? Will the dreaded comments section destroy our very souls? Will our cats become superstars and leave Jeff and me in the dust? You know you want to get in on the ground floor of this thing!

 

Thanks in advance for watching. :)

Allure

The summer of me painting like a madwoman continues!

A couple of months ago I saw a set of fishing lures in a store and thought they would fit right in with the things I usually paint: small, colorful, shiny. My dad used to fish, so I asked him if I could use some of his lures for a painting. I remember being absolutely fascinated by my dad's tackle box when I was a kid. Everything in there looked like adorable little toys. DANGEROUS toys! Dad warned me that his lures were very old but I was welcome to them, and he gave me a box. A couple were too ugly to use, but I was charmed by the others, and I especially liked their cracked paint jobs. I added some of my most feminine jewelry, and I like how they resemble bubbles and underwater plants.

I started painting the red one because I am in love with red. Then I tackled the lure in the lower right corner. It was similarly cracked and had silver glitter on its side. I painted that one square at a time and am pleased with the way it turned out.

Elsewhere: the beginning of a "Tiny Torpedo" is in the top-left and some blue beads in the bottom-left. I still needed to paint two more big, difficult-looking lures. At that point I already had a title figured out: "Allure."

I added some more blue jewelry and a red bead in the lower left corner, a string of pearls with many tiresome little connecty things, and one of the tough lures. It's underneath the red and white one and is the size of my forearm. Lots of texture and color changes are happening in this one, and I spent an entire day working on it. Fun fact: I listened to a lot of episodes of Harmontown, a favorite, hilarious podcast from Community creator Dan Harmon, while I worked on this painting.

Over the next couple of days I added the lipsticked, yellow-eyed lure. Its body was incredibly difficult because it was covered with tiny, raised diamond shapes that got smaller as I moved down its multicolored length. Such a hassle, and it also took an entire day to finish. The next day I took care of everything in the top-left quadrant. Most of those colors are dark and required at least two coats of paint. But I was nearing the home stretch and was eager to finish the fancy, fancy top-right corner.

After a couple of intense, poppy-painting days, "Allure" was finished! That is my favorite pin, and I wanted it to look very glossy and almost wet. I had a blast with this painting. Please check out my prints, available here.

I've also started to put Allure on items in my merchandise store! Click here to visit the store, and just click on whatever category you're interested in. I plan to add more products over the next day or two!

In other news, yesterday Jeff and I drove up to Chicago to visit Mel, one of its newest citizens. She lives in an apartment in Logan Square, and we brought her a bed frame, rolled-up mattress, and air conditioner. Let's hear it for Mazda 6's incredible trunk space! Those items were installed within an hour, and after that we spent the day together, eating lots of great food and shooting the breeze. She's been there for a month now and found a job as a prep cook at a restaurant/bar called Rootstock. We really miss her. But Mel's adjusting to the big city with astonishing ease--this is because she actually knows how to talk to people, imagine that!--and we admire her adaptability so much. Brave girl!

Here are Jeff and Mel about one microsecond before Mel rushed the camera. Aren't they adorable? So much love for these two.