Mom and Dad's Wedding

I wanted to paint a picture of Mom and Dad's wedding. The photo is a little faded out. Lots of errors in the painting, but like it anyway. Probably because of the subject matter.

Daisy and Friend

Candy and Bryan asked me to paint his dad's dogs. They are getting older, but still have personality.

Mom and Mark at the Ocean

This painting is of Mom and Mark walking to the ocean to spread my dad's ashes into the sea. June of 2011. It is done on yupo. First a wash of fluid acrylic is put on the paper and dried. Then using a subtractive method, alcohol is used to remove the whites. Finally, the darks are added with water color.

CHRISTMAS CARDS

I have never posted these two Christmas cards. The first is the one I was going to send out this year, but never got to do it. Don't know what happened. The second one is done on yupo in a sort of monoprint style.

ON INSPECTION

Before they moved to St. Louis, my grandkids would take turns coming over for Sundays. It was Iris's turn. She had on her pink fuzzy hat and was intent on inspecting a small plastic dog with a magnifying glass. I don't know why.

Mine is not to question it...just to paint the moment.

FOR THE BIRDS

I was reminded that I've never posted my paintings from the trip to Parrot Island, a bird sanctuary in Tennessee that we visited on our last reunion.

The first is a sun conure, done in watercolor pencils. I really enjoyed teaching myself more about watercolor pencils and doing an entire painting in them. Until this time, I'd only used the pencils for touch ups or details that were hard for me to do with just a brush. (I don't have steady hands with tiny brushes.)

The second of the blue parrots was one I considered a total flop. The original background was just too muddy. But I cropped away until it was this skinny, used it as a bookmark, and I like it way better. (Backgrounds are my weakest area)

This bird was also in the sanctuary. I believe it eventually landed on my sister Judy's hair. We were able to get into the large cage and photograph these birds.
This little guy is done on regular 140 lb Arches cp, doing the background wash before anything else was painted.

My Grandma Dorothy

This is my father's mother, Dorothy Mae Mackey Dearing. I painted this from one of Dad's favorite pictures of his mom. The greatest difficulty was that it was one of those old fashioned studio portraits that hand painted over the lips and cheeks. So it was difficult to see where the true lip line and cheek structure was. It gave me a lot of pleasure to see how much Dad liked his surprise Christmas gift.

I printed it in two ways: the original color version, and the black and white on brown paper. I liked the way they both turned out.