Summer Painting #8

It has already been a warm summer so far, so I thought that I would do a painting of a “cool” item from the suggested list. “Popsicle” is one of the suggestions on the list, though I am not sure why “ice cream cone” isn’t, but just as well, they are both a ton of Weight Watcher points.

( Side note: We were in Costo yesterday and for the heck of it, I checked out the Weight Watchers points for the Costco Chocolate and Strawberry sundaes. Yeah, they might be cheap but they are over 35 points each!!! Damn. You have to eat 0 points all week to eat one of those!)

The orange creamsicle is my husband’s favorite popsicle. I always liked those Good Humor popsicles with the solid piece of fudge in the middle. Even when I was young, I preferred anything chocolate. Although I wouldn’t turn down an orange creamsicle. Just recently, we went to visit the grandkids in South Jersey and my grandson and his friends were eating those push pops that are long sticks of colored/flavored water in a plastic sleeve. Kids love those. I used to keep them in the freezer for my kids.

When we used to go down the Shore (Philadelphians and South Jersey folks do NOT call it “Jersey Shore” ((that’s ssoooo NY) we called it going “down the Shore.”), we would sit on the beach and they had guys with coolers and that would yell “Ice Cream! Fudgie Wudgies!” That had the same effect as an ice cream truck driving through the neighborhood. The guys would get swamped with folks wanting ice cream. I remember the ice cream sandwiches….YUM.

Well here is the orange creamsicle painted on a 4×4 wood panel using Acryl Gouache.

Enjoy!

Small painting done on 4x4 cradled wood panel using acrylic gouache. Orange Creamsicle popsicle with a pale green background.

Summer Painting #7

Here is painting #7. One of my favorite flowers to grow and I am surprised I don’t have any here in my garden. I used to plant seeds every year when I lived in NJ and I would watch the goldfinches hang upside down to pull the yummy seeds out. I found one of those photos and there were bees and goldfinches in my sunflowers..

We were up in NJ recently to visit family and we drove by my former house up there. I was dismayed to see that it wasn’t cared for and the once beautiful majestic maple out in front of the house was a dried up dead skeleton. Equally dismaying was our much loved Colorado Blue Spruce had been cut down. My kids used to play under that tree. That tree was home to many creatures. How terribly sad.

My lilacs have also been cut down. Seriously? They hated lilacs?

When you sells a family home, you hope that the next family moving in would treat it with love and take care of it. We thought that we had sold it to people who would love it and the trees. The lilacs smelled so pretty in the Spring.

That house was brand new when we moved into it. I even picked where I wanted it on the property so that the trees could stay.

Ah, such is life.

This sunflower is reminiscent of the ones from that house. Another small 4×4 painting on wood panel.

Small painting done on 4x4 cradled wood panel using acrylic gouache. Subject is a solo sunflowers standing proudly as indicated by just the sky in the background. There is a bee headed toward the sunflower to load up on some pollen.

Summer Painting #6

One of the prompts for the daily painters challenge is “fish.” We have a mahi-mahi metal wall hanging that I have no idea where we inherited it from, but it has been in my father-in-law’s house in Port St Lucie, migrated to our Jensen Beach house where it sat in storage and then it moved again with us to where we live now, We hung it on our back fence.

I never knew what it was until today when I did this prompt. I was looking up Florida game fish and surprise, there was our fish! I also found out that the mahi-mahi is also the “dolphin” fish that shows up on Florida menus. I never knew that they were the same fish, different name. We actually had a discussion one night when we were out to dinner because one of our party was upset to see “dolphin” on a menu. We had to convince them that there was also fish that was called a dolphin fish. It would have been a lot easier if we could have just said “mahi-mahi.”

Well now we know.

This is another small painting on 4×4 wood panel using matte acrylic also known as acrylic gouache.

Small painting done on 4x4 cradled wood panel using acrylic gouache. Subject is a mahi-mahi swimming in the water. Lots of yellows, blues and greens.

Summer Painting #5

Small 4x4 work done on wood panel of fireflies flying/dancing in the dark evening sky.

This is the last daily painting for this week. This is a small 4×4 painting of fireflies doing their summer evening dance in the dark. It was a little tricky because the fireflies in the painting are so small on the 4×4 surface. I almost did a 6×6 and I still may do a larger painting of fireflies. This was a fun painting to do.

Florida doesn’t have many fireflies. I have heard that there is only a small part of Florida where you can find them. I miss seeing fireflies but we do get cicadas, almost year round. And love bugs that stick to the front of your car or pickup truck. They are brutal to wash off.

Back in New Jersey and New York, fireflies came out every summer. They would fly like drunken pilots and you’d find them in your hair, they’d land on your lap, and on fences, in gardens. They were everywhere. I’ve never seen the females on the ground but I’ve seen plenty of flying blinking males. Fireflies were one of the best things to watch in the summer and it’s a shame their season is so short.

I heard something sad that overdevelopment is also taking its toll on fireflies. They would be a sad loss. I feel that every child should have the joy of chasing fireflies.

It’s just not summer until you see fireflies.

Happy Independence Day

This is one of the paintings that I did for today. I am debating on posting the other but AI poaching has me hesitant and I want to save some unpublished work for art directors, so that other piece will probably get turned into a postcard.

This one is another 4×4 small art that I ran through Procreate to knock down the pixels a little bit. I should really pull it into Photoshop to make it web ready but I am sitting outside enjoying the morning.

I am keeping this short today. Happy Independence Day!

Fireworks

Summer Painting #3

Small 4x4 painting painting using Acryl Gouache on a 4x4 cradled birchwood panel.Sandpipers on the beach done on wood block with beach colors.

Today’s painting is of a subject near and dear to my heart….sandpipers.  Sandpipers are comical little birds and I could sit and watch them over and over without ever getting tired of them.  They have their own personalities and there always seems to be a bully that wants to control the entire beach. 

Disney Pixar has an absolute charming animated short of a baby sandpiper coping with life on the beach.  It’s one of my favorites.

This little painting is a compilation of sketches and photos that I have taken of sandpipers and the beach scene itself is based on a separate photo that I took to study waves. I have so many reference photos that I need to label them or I won’t be able to find the subjects that I took photos of to ensure that I had the reference. It can be a dizzying circle.

In this little painting, I wanted to capture the vignette of glancing up and seeing the squad dash by on their way to their next tasty morsel.  That moment when you look up from the book you are reading on the beach and something catches your attention, which turns out to be a squabbling bunch of sandpipers. 

You can’t help but watch as they run down to the water to pick at the sand, and they run for their lives when a wave comes crashing back.  It’s so dramatic, LOL.  And I love how they always stay ahead of the humans on the beach and don’t like to get too close to us.  If they feel we are getting to close, the flock synchronizes their departure together and glide further up the beach. They’ll keep doing this if you are walking the beach and they keep flying up the beach until they get so far and circle round back to where they started. There is a method to their movements.

Enjoy this little painting!  

I am also toying with Substack and Patreon for alternatives to Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram.   There is a lot of art piracy these days especially with AI and I have read many discussions from artists finding other ways to show their art on line.  Art takes a lot of time to do and there is nothing worse than putting in hours of work only to have a huge corporation poach your ideas. I am glad that I never did video posts so that there is no online presence of my process.  

Summer Painting #2

Summer is such a fun time of year. Most of us look forward to the longer days where we have much more time in the evenings to enjoy being outside or even just getting things done around the house. The sun comes up earlier which means we can get out earlier to do our daily exercise before the sun gets too warm. It sets later so we still have plenty of time to sit on the beach and veg out.

When you live in the Northern part of the US, the sun comes up a LOT earlier. Here in Florida, the sun starts lighting up the sky around 6-ish and doesn’t officially rise until almost 6:30 AM, give or take a few minutes.

This morning, our sun came up around 6:29 AM and will set around 8:25-ish.

I find the difference in daylight fascinating between where I live now vs I where I lived before. I remember getting up early in the Cape May area of NJ to go for a morning bike and being surprised that at 6 AM, it was already cooking the landscape. Here, if we go out at 6AM, we need to make ourselves visible to drivers in the dawning light.

Summer sun can be really warm, but the shade here isn’t bad, especially when the humidity drops midday. I sometimes sit out on the lanai to escape the AC, listen to the birds and the whisper of the banana leaves swaying in the breeze. The Summer is making our bananas more prolific, too. We currently have 4 plants producing bananas right now. Three weeks ago, we harvested two full stalks of bananas and they ripened so fast that I quickly gave some to my daughter and her family, made banana bread and muffins, chopped up a bunch to make banana “ice cream” and froze the rest for smoothies. I wanted to bring some to my son’s family in New Jersey, last week, but they ripened before I could. I gave them banana bread instead.

To honor the sun, today’s daily painting is a friendly sun welcoming the long days of summer.

4x4 size original art of a friendly yellow sun with pink flowers and butterflies with a summery blue sky.
Sunny days ahead

Summer Painting #1

I have been doing some small daily paintings painted on small (and square) cradled wooden panels. I picked small formats because it’s easier to do a painting a day when you work small.

I have been trying to think of some ideas for a calendar which is why the square format works best right now.   Since it is summer, I have been doing summer themed paintings from a list posted by Marisa Cummings of Creative Thursday.  The challenge started on the 13th but I have been holding off posting my daily paintings until the beginning of July, which is today.


The prompts are random and you can do them in the order posted or pick and choose which ones to do or even combine them.  The goal is to do one painting a day and the prompts are suggestions.

I like creating little paintings that are happy and perky and I picked a bunch of small 4×4 blocks to use as my surface.  Blocks are nice because they don’t need to be framed and they can sit on a desk or hang on a wall.  If you would like to purchase one, I will be creating a shop for the purpose of selling them, or I may just use the Etsy shop I set up several years ago, that I never use.  I haven’t gotten that far.  I might look into Shopify as well.

I am also working on a paper maché project where you have to do functional art but mine will most likely be and art for art’s sake piece.  I am drawing a complete blank for function but I have loads of idea for the “just art” category. In the mean time I have been saving all sorts of junk to turn into art.  Maybe that’s where my functional art comes in.  Turning junk into art. Eureka!

Small 4x4 painting painting using Acryl Gouache on a 4x4 cradled birchwood panel. The painting is small white daisy looking flowers with butterflies and a dragonfly flying over the flowers. Painting is down with blues, greens and white with a hint of lilac.

International Chihuahua Appreciation Day

I had already done my “day” sketch earlier of National Chicken Dance Day. (I sketched a chicken, dancing.

I have been going about my day working on some catching up, sketching and drawing away.  …listening to Zoom recordings either on repeat or ones that I missed.  Hoping to get to the juicy podcasts I was listening to….

As I am listening to the Zoom recording I was playing, an email pinged and I glanced up….wait, what’s this?  An email from AKC.org to alert me that it is International Chihuahua Appreciation Day?  How did I miss THAT?!  Damn I could have sketched Mack and Lucy this morning in my dailies!

I have tons to post about Lucy and Mack so I am prepared for this.  As I mentioned a few months back, we have a new addition to the family.  Lucy came into our lives a year ago, actually this week.  She was a Mother’s Day gift from my husband.  Which the joke is sort of on him, or maybe me, because Lucy thinks my husband walks on water and I am only good for a bed warmer. 

Last month I was making a lot of dog art for an event, and I was revisiting my tiny dog series, blowing some of those up or making all new new ones.  I did one portrait of Lucy and a new one of Mack.  Mack is Mr GQ.  If I need a reference photo, I just take it.  He’ll pose all day.  This portrait is from a recent photo.  You can see his eyes are getting a little bit cloudy but he’s still chugging along at 13. He’s a dashing long haired chihuahua.

"Mack" 13 yr old long haired red Fawn chihuahua, sporting and red collar Blue background with dotted border.
Mack, our long haired Chihuahua

Lucy on the other hand, John and I needed ID photos for AKC of her and I think all four of us were exhausted after that session. Mack was exhausted just watching the show.  And this is WITH the STAR Puppy training. At least I had few I could use for portraits after all of that struggling.  

"Lucy" Tricolor Chihuahua portrait, black, tan, white with purple background and circles in pink ringed with ivory.
Lucy, the 1 year old

Chihuahuas are probably one of the most MISunderstood breeds.  They are very intelligent.   Their Napoleon demeanor has a lot to do with self preservation in a world where something minor to a human or child could be fatal to a chihuahua.  Even when you have chihuahuas, you need to proceed with caution with other chihuahuas until they learn you aren’t going to hurt them or their owner.  They are fierce little watch dogs but they really are amazing little companions.

Both of these portraits are done on cradled wood boards with acrylic gouache, colored pencils, ink and whatever else I grabbed that was handy.

ENJOY and Happy International Chihuahua Appreciation Day

It takes two

Heart shaped art of two coyotes singing a love song as indicated by the hearts flying from the direction of their open mouths in a singing pose. They are side by side, facing each other. Full moon with a mauve toned sky and there is a heart on the full moon

Here, our two lonely coyotes meet and sing a duet.

I really like how this heart turned out.  When I started it, I almost thought I was going to need to gesso over it and start over.  The coyotes and ground turned out fine, but the background was a hot mess. 

I layered the background over and over until the dusky looking one slowly appeared.  At this point, I am not sure I remember how I did it because I kept going over it with muting down the original background and blending it with buff colors until it looked like a sky.  It is a mixture of buff tones (buff titanium, pale peach, flesh tones) and the original palette mix that I kept toning down….down…and down.

I kept blending until I achieved the sky and mood I was looking for and when this final layer dried, I was so happy with it.  Sometimes the hot messes morph into happy accidents, and into something that looks more like “I meant to do that.”  I like the atmospheric quality that this heart has, almost like it shimmers and that was the look I wanted for this.

Sometimes, as an artist, you have to keep pushing through a problem until it is resolved.  If you give up too soon, you may have only been only a step away from resolving your dilemma instead of giving up and failing.  Even failures have value if you use them to learn what to do better the next time, but the key is to keep going to learn how to achieve your goal.

I know people who rip out their “ugly” pages and hot messes in their sketchbooks.  I never understood that.  Ugly pages have hidden gems in them and you don’t see the value until you flip through your sketchbook months or years later.  Every time I create, I learn something new.  That is the value of pushing through to the end.

That’s one of the main lessons I have learned over the years. Even when the art is in its ugly phase, keep going for the swan.