Undersea Step 3, 4

When I looked at step three I thought the turtles didn't look like they were underwater and that the bottom of the sea wasn't integrated with the rest of the picture. The solution, I thought, would be to give it all a wash of Thalo blue, green shade. When I did that, I lost all my vibrant colors that I loved so much about the painting. Since then, I've been trying to regain some of the vibrance without making it look like everything is pasted on a background. I've never had so much difficulty with this kind of painting. Now that I'm showing it to the world, I'm having problems. It just serves to remind me not to take myself too seriously. It's only paper and pigment, get over it! The outcome will be posted soon.

The Auditorium

I painted this for http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com. The assignment was to paint a scene from the Canary Islands, off the coast of Spain. I found this scene on google maps.

This is an amazing building; an auditorium in Tenerife. From the angle that I painted it looks like a huge ocean liner. You can tell it's size by comparing the size of the car. I'm not very good at cars so I only painted one. Also, there are two tiny figures towards the back on the right side. The people look dwarfed by this building. It looks like it's all white so what I'm painting is the shadows on the sides, quite fun. The view from the side of the building (maybe someone else will paint that) the building reminds me of a giant conquistador's helmet.

Organizing magazine articles

It must be a spring thing, I've finished a project to preserve the art magazine articles that I really like. I came to the conclusion that in order to avoid renting a warehouse for my art things I have to pare down some things. The first thing I decided to tackle is my collection of years of art magazines. Each month each exhibitor is required to staff the gallery at our art league for one afternoon. In between talking to guests I began going through my magazines and cutting out the articles and artwork that I really liked. These were put in sheet protectors and put in a ring binder. I ended up with two ring binders, but it's much better and more organized than a stack of magazines. I can easily find subjects or artists by going to the appropriate section. It took quite a few afternoons over several months but I'm finally finished up to 2009.

P.S. I'm still working on the Undersea painting, too.