Scarlet Tanager

I hope everyone enjoyed the Holiday Saturday.  Start looking in your backyard for the return of the song birds.  This is one of the pretty and brilliantly colored ones you might see especially on the east coast of the U.S.  It is the male Scarlet Tanager.  I captured this one in colored pencil.

Ancient Goat Stone work

Another week of meeting fun, I had 2 1/2 hours of meetings on Wednesday.  The first hour was good, but after the break and five minutes of the second I sketched this out and finished the shading later.  I used a mechanical pencil and a small pocket notebook.  The goat was from a picture on a daily desk calendar.  The daily photo was of a Pharaoh era marble stone carving of a goat.

This is my current little notebook.  I got this second hand, it was made for Turkish Airlines, I thought it was pretty cool.  I have about 23 notebooks which are filled up with ideas, sketches, experiments, and notes.  So I just counted all my notebooks and I might have a problem because I stopped a 80, half of which are a third to half full.  So just a little obsessive.

May Fly

So I am not a great fisherman or an obsessive one, but it is an activity I have enjoyed with my Dad, my son, my father-in-law, my wife, my daughters, my nieces, and my brother-in-law.  Usually we fish for trout, occasionally Bass and Catfish.  I like the places fishing takes me and I enjoy the people I go with to where the fish live.

Short-Tailed Weasel

This is a Short Tailed Weasel in the winter phase so he is white.  I did this with colored markers and is based on the weasels I have seen in my years of hiking and rock climbing.  I have only seen one in white in Colorado.  I have seen these in Utah, Colorado and near the Shawangunks of New York while rock climbing.

Mute Swan

This is a Mute Swan.  They are a introduced bred from Europe.   They are more common here in US park ponds.  I have seen Trumpeter Swans one time in Yellowstone National Park, they are endangered  but are becoming more common now.  This was done with colored pencils.

Durango and Silverton Railroad

Happy Sunday!  Just a quick post today.  This is an Oil Painting of the narrow gauge Train in Durango Colorado above the Las Animas River.  The train is well worth the trip to Durango and is part of the history of the country and its mining days.

Giraffes - three color exercise

To follow the thread of ways to improve your painting capabilities which I have been blogging on for the past couple of days, this painting is an example of using three colors or a restricted palate to paint.  This oil painting was done with Titanium White, Raw Umber, and Cobalt Blue.  The use of just three colors allows you to focus on the values, i.e. the dark, medium, and light.  Too many colors can be confusing and can distract you from what you want to paint.  Not getting the values right can cause your painting to lose it's ability to represent three dimensions while painting in two.  This is part of the many problems and struggles in the life long pursuit of learning to paint.  This exercise to improve is similar to  the toned paper drawings a wrote about in the post from yesterday.