Washington D.C. Temple Study (in progress)

Salt Lake Temple (in progress)

Daily Painting #9

#9 Grapefruit
7 x 5

Sold

Salt Lake Temple (in progress)

Mark (in progress)

At Sea (in progress)

Fall Refinery (in progress)

Daily Painting #8

#8 - Fan
4 x 2.5
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Washington D.C. Temple Study (in progress)

Today's progress was very unsatisfying. I rubbed off 90% of the paint I applied. Two steps forward and one step back.

Salt Lake Temple (in progress)

Just the beginning, obviously.

Washington D.C. Temple Study (in progress)

Mountainside

Mountainside
14 x 18
sold

Daily Painting #7

#7 - Green Apple
3x3

Sold

Fall Refinery (in progress)

Daily Painting #6

#6 - Jewelry Mat
5x2.5
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Mountainside (in progress)

Daily Painting #5

#5 - Pink Roses
2 x 7
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Mountainside (in progress)

Goal: finish this painting by Christmas.

Daily Painting #4

#4 - Rose
5 x 2.5

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Daily Painting #3

#3 - Apple
3 x 3

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Daily Painting #2

#2 - Lemon
4 x 4
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Mountainside (in progress)

Blue Plateau

Blue Plateau
12 x 12
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Daily Painting #1

#1 - Winter Junk Yard

5.5 x 7.5
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Looking at other artist's blogs, I found a lot of my fellow artists are doing a "daily painting". These are quick small paintings that they finish in less than a day. There were a lot of really neat paintings and it inspired me to begin my own set of daily paintings.

Blue Plateau (in progress)

I am so close to being done with this wintry wonderland. So much as I complain about being cold, I miss driving past scenes like this and waking up to a glimmering city. Maybe I'll keep painting winter scenes to fill the void.

Tree of Life #2

Tree of Life #2
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The miracle of the ear opens to us the world of sound. The vibrations are caught and funneled down our ear canals, moving our ear drum and vibrating the tiniest bones in our body. One of these minuscule bones, the stapes, in turn vibrates against the oval window of the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with a fluid which moves in response to the sound vibrations. Small hairs line the cochlea and sway with the movement of the fluid. It is finally these hairs that convert the sound into electric signals to be sent to the brain.

We experience so much of life through our ears, and what joy that brings.
Some of my favorite things to hear:
-Mark's voice
-Rain
-Thunder (Unless it's in the middle of the night, then it moves down the list)
-The morning birds
-Music
-The cackling of a dying fire
This painting of the cochlea (cross-section) celebrates the life of sound.

What are your favorite sounds?

Tree of Life #2 (in progress)

As I mentioned before, I am beginning to work again on my Trees of Life series. This one is not complete, but is getting pretty close. I have not yet decided how much blue to crop; I bounce back and forth between not cropping any and cropping 1/3 to 1/2 of it.
Any guesses on where you can find this tree in your body?

Blue Plateau (in progress)

I have been complaining about the cold here. I go around my house in a hat and gloves, and I'm hoping for slippers for Christmas. I am very glad that I have a heater for the studio, it is such a waste to heat up the whole house just to get that one room warm during the day. So, I'm not cold when I'm painting, but sit down to the computer...my fingers are like ice. My car said it was 55 degrees when I went to the grocery store. To me that felt really cold. Now, I grew up in Utah - snowy, sub-freezing Decembers. How did I get to be so wimpy? Still, I hope there is snow when we go to Utah for Christmas :)

Mountainside (in progress)

I'm really glad that I have a live-in critic, and we both came to the conclusion that I needed to start filling in the foliage and the foreground. The flat green space made the whole painting flat and just odd, really. So I started working on fixing that.

French Ultramarine

Another color I use all the time is French Ultramarine. Its healthy (now known adverse effects anyway), its transparent, its lightfast (ASTM rating I). I won't go into such a long technical explanation this time. French Ultramarine is a synthetic pigment which mimics the natural ultramarine pigment made from lapis lazuli. The pigment is a complex silicate of sodium and aluminum which also contains sulfur. However, since the synthetic particles are more uniform and smaller than the natural particles the synthetic ultramarine is less vivid. The synthetic pigment was created in 1830 after discovering the ingredients (and the French "National Society for the Encouragement of Industry" offering a prize to develop it). The main drive was the cost of the lapis lazuli. Bringing down the price allowed "every-day" artists access to ultramarine blue. Good thing too, I go through it like crazy!

Mountainside (in progress)

The rock formations are starting to form! Also, excellent news, I got a heater for my studio today so my fingers won't be freezing all day. It has been pretty chilly up there for the last couple days.