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.
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.
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 I am debating on posting the other but AI poaching has me hesitant and I want to save some unpublished work for art directors, so that other piece will probably get turned into a postcard.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!
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 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.
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!
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, 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, 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
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.
Coyote song can evoke many emotions. One of them can be fear. There is nothing more surreal than the first time you hear the yips and howls, especially when you hear them just outside your window. A cold primal fear grips your heart upon being awakened by coyotes.
I’ll never forgot the first time I heard coyotes, and we were in a neighborhood full of houses. Not far from the Savannah State Park, but it was surprising. Your instincts kick in without your being aware that your body knows what to do even though you haven’t been in that situation before.
It was tough to fall asleep after that.
The primal part of you is on high alert, but the logical, curious side of you wants to peek out the window to see if you can see the coyotes outside. As much as I wanted to see them, I didn’t venture out of the house until morning. A six foot fence wasn’t making me feel safe that night.
Once that first experience was done, we’ve heard their songs being sung in other places, like Lake Placid, Florida. Late Placid, FL, is right in the middle of orange groves and cattle ranches. It’s sort of like an island in the sea of Florida’s version of a prairie. There a plenty of coyotes there, you can hear them in the distance at night.
When you hear a coyote song and you expect to hear it, the song has a different context. It was that context that inspired me to write the haiku above. The loneliness of a single coyote, or coyotes calling to their mates or pack. Maybe a love song in the night; a young male seeking young female to start their own pack.
I haven’t posted this yet because it was hanging up for Valentines’ Day. This is our little family as it is today, with Hubby. Mack, Lucy and myself. We look a little different than we did last year, and the year before.
Last year, we had just lost Chloe so we were still in mourning for Valentines’ Day. A heart for last year would only have consisted of my hubby, Mack and myself. I don’t think we really were up to much of anything last year. Mack was moping around the house and John and I were trying to adjust to life without Chloe. Even now, with Lucy in the family, we still miss Chloe and her spunky bossy little self.
Lucy has a dog car seat that we put her in for her safety as well as it is her “safe” place in the car and whenever we leave the house. If we take her out of the car for walks or dog training, she can’t wait to get back in her seat and will leap toward it when she is being placed back in the car.
Looking at Lucy in the car for an outing today, I mentioned to John how Chloe would have loved that thing. It’s perfect for looking out windows or to basically veg out. Chloe would sit in the back seat with her legs braced against John’s driving. It was so funny. Lucy just hangs in her seat with her front legs braced against the front of the basket and her back leaning on that back of the basket. Her expressions are hilarious. She thinks she’s such a badass in that seat.
So now the heart includes Lucy instead of Chloe. Chloe will always be imbedded our hearts and we’ll always have the memories of her. She’s always with is and now, Lucy is with us, too.
Gina Lento: Fine Art and Illustration 
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