Practice, Practice, Practice

I have spoken before about the 10,000 hour guideline, i.e. the need to do a minimum of 10,000 hours to  master a skill.  I hit various levels of frustration with my paintings.  I have many started and half finished paintings.  Some will be re-addressed and finished, some will be destroyed, and some will be utilized to start a new version of a painting.  I have heard of another artist referring to these paintings as little evil ones, which torment your creative side.  James Gurney has a semi-annual burning for failed paintings.  The 10K hours may be arbitrary but it is a good goal and above are coming of the paint mixing exercises I have done in oil paint.

Scissor - Tailed Flycatcher

This is a colored pencil sketch of a Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher.  We saw this is Oklahoma and I think it is the state's bird.  It definitely is a unique and special bird, not one of the run of the mill see in the yard types.  It will catch your eye on the fence or on the wire.

ProngHorn Antelope

SO if you are driving the long stretches of the American Outback i.e. any of the high plains areas of the mid-west to the inter Mountain areas of the Rockies, always be on the look out for the fastest animal in North America, the Pronghorn.  We have seen them in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, but they are everywhere.   They like it in the wide open so they can see they're enemies and out run them.

Tampa Tower

Waiting for my flight back to DC, I had 15 minutes and captured the tower at Tampa's airport.  I liked the clouds and the different odd lines.  I unfortunately caught the clouds too much like they were with the odd size similarity.  I should have edited this more to create some different sizes and thus more interest for a better composition.

More Travel Sketches - not well planned

I do not always plan the art work out as well as I should.  I got to spend two hours at the beach in near Doha, Qatar.  Qatar near were I was looked all like a beach, the difference being the proximity to the water.  I had very little time and only had a ballpoint pen and the hotel notepad so I made the best of the time and sketched the crab carcass.  Desperate times, Desperate measures.

The Rocky Mountains

This is a large pen sketch of the Rocky Mountains near Estes Park Colorado.  This was a bit of an experiment to try and capture the different foliage, trees, rocks and mountain slopes with just pen.  I enjoyed this one but it eats a lot of time.  It was easy to get lost in this one, just like the scenery.

Even the Quick Sketch is more important than you know

The quick sketch can capture things of importance you don't even realize at the time.  This is a quick sketch I did back in May of 2000.  It is of my son James at age 14.  We went fishing at Deer Creek Reservoir in Utah.  We went with a co-worker, Larry and his son.  Larry brought a syringe for filling the worms with air to make them more appealing for the Yellow Perch we were fishing for.  James and Larry's son (about 8 years old) ran around flipping rocks over and killing bugs with the syringe by injecting air in them.  So the boys had fun, and James caught 8 perch to my one.  I teased him that he kept catching the same one as we were releasing them back into the reservoir.  We also saw Western Grebes on the water and I sketched our Perches.