My Sunflowers~ WIP & Completion

Step 4) Completion. I've added more gouache, some colored pencil including the gold metallic for accent and tweaked this as much as I dare. I see things I'd like to change or adjust a little, some of the foliage became a little muddy for my taste but overall I say "mission accomplished".

Step 3) Here I've begun working on values and color temperature with repeated glazes. I've also added some toned gouache in a few spots.

Step 2) The frisket film has been removed and I've started painting the flowers. At this point I'm just trying to put some paint down and get my bearings. I'm working in transparent watercolor only at this stage.

Step 1) I prepped 140# Fabriano HP w/c paper by applying frisket film and cutting around my subjects with an Exacto knife. Afterward I added some gesso to the background area but didn't cover the entire background. I mixed one container of plain Phthalo blue fluid acrylic (diluted w/water), another with Hookers green fluid acrylic (diluted)and a third with a mixture of both the Phthalo and the Hookers, also diluted. I then proceeded to pour paint. Pouring paint is always a mess but Phthalos take it to a whole new level. I had Phthalo blue fingernails for three days.

Sorry to be so late in posting an update but I lost most of my internet connection last Tuesday, the 27th due to circumstances out of my control. It was finally restored this afternoon to working order. Apparently the underground cable is in need of replacing which was causing my signal interruptions but the engineer sent from my provider managed to get me up and running for the time being.

I'm posting a WIP along with the finished painting. This version was basically a dry run for the main event and is only 15" x 9". I kept to the palette in my last post and I like it! There's a few things I will probably adjust on the final painting but overall I'm pleased with my results.

Sunflowers~Working Out A Palette

This was my experiment using colored pencils. I made notes, jotting down which color combos I liked and seemed to work well together. I have to write everything down these days because my memory has become a tea strainer.

Here I've done my best to match the CP colors with watercolor. I think I've finally got a plan now. I found a gold metallic colored pencil I forgot I had so I added that over the w/c in a few places as a possible accent.

Did you think I got lost? I did...for awhile. After several attempts (and as many failures) to settle on a palette I hit a brick wall. I couldn't seem to work out a palette for the sunflowers that excited me. My new favorite color is DS Quin. violet and I wanted to work this color into the painting somehow. Nick Simmons suggested I take a look at the work of Jimmy Wright . Wright paints amazing sunflowers in pastel and uses unusual color combinations. I also took out photos I'd taken in my gardens and browsed through those for inspiration. Last night I finally got out my 120 ct. set of Prismacolor colored pencils, printed out a copy of my line drawing and just played. I came up with a palette I really like so the next challenge was to match the CP colors to watercolor. I think I've succeeded.

I plan to do a smaller version of the painting first. I have a 12" x 18" block of Fabriano HP w/c paper I can use. I was disappointed to learn a nearby store no longer carries certain art supplies so I will have to order my full sheets online. I can't understand why, with all the artists in the area, that we don't have a decent art supply outlet. }:( The nearest is a day trip away, especially in summer when traffic is ridiculous. Griping over..........

My Sunflowers~color study continued

I fiddled around some more with the color study I posted the 13th of this month. I'm still undecided as to a palette for this painting. The background concerns me more than anything else. In the photo the sky is what I would call Cobalt Blue Deep. Looks nice but it's predictable and boring, IMO. Even though the sketch looks complicated the shapes are pretty simple. Can I get away with doing something really fun with the background without over complicating the painting? Do I really have to resort to using masking fluid? Can I get powerful colors like turquoise and Indian yellow to work together? How will adding gouache affect the painting? How can I produce convincing clouds? I tried to answer all these questions today and am posting my results. I learned a few things...some things I liked, some not so much. I will continue to try new colors and techniques until I have my "ah Ha!" moment.

Moon Shot

It's so rare that I get a really good photo of the Moon but I did last night. It's on the wane and it was very orange. If you look close I even caught a few stars, too. A short time later a cloud bank moved beneath it and it lit the top of the clouds with orange light but I wasn't fast enough to get that shot. Shame because it would've been awesome.

My Sunflowers~WIP value study

I finished my value study. I was most interested to see if I still had good distribution of the lightest and darkest values after making my changes and I believe I do. There's nice undulating horizontal flow, my eye isn't lead out of the picture in any direction nor are there areas that grab attention away from the composition as a whole. The main focal point is the dead sunflower on the viewer's left which was my intention.

My Sunflowers~ WIP Update

I think this will be the final drawing. There is good movement throughout, interesting shapes in the corners and nothing pops out at me that seems 'off'. Next will be a value study.

After removing the extra bloom I noticed two leaves came together to form an almost symmetrical shape which at first I thought looked kinda cool. After looking at the drawing for awhile I realized my eye went immediately to that shape and stopped so that needed to be addressed.

The arrow is pointing to another bloom tucked behind the two in front. Too much going on in such a small area, IMO so it had to go.

I think I'm finally satisfied with my drawing. I did a fair amount of editing and made other changes. I've never done anything quite this complicated before and I'm beginning to doubt I'll be able to paint this in a loose style. I don't want to go too realistic either so I'll be walking a fine line once I start actually painting.

Birthday Card

Truth be told, I could sure use a fur job(haircut)and a 'tail' lift right about now. ;D

Yesterday was my birthday...again. Seems they come twice a year now. At least it feels that way sometimes. The older I get the faster time goes by. Anyhoo, my kids got me this card and I thought I'd share it. We are all cat owners or have been cat owners and whenever we get together the conversation invariably turns to cats at some point. Maybe when grandkids come along that will change but I kinda doubt it. At most every holiday we exchange cat themed cards, too. I don't think we're alone in this cat fascination either. The one thing that's always selling at the gallery are my cat notecards. I was surprised that my Xmas cat cards have almost sold out this summer!

My Sunflowers~color study

I took one small section from the whole and did a quick color study last night. It looks sloppy because it is. I've got the end result in my mind but I'm not sure I can pull it off without resorting to using masking fluid. I really don't want to use it for this painting but it may be unavoidable. It's either that or gouache. I'd like to paint this in a loose style while still retaining all the great sunlit areas. My favorite sunflowers are the dead ones with their heads hung down, petals dragging. I'm still working on the drawing and doing a lot of editing. The edge detection feature often gives confusing information and I'm still trying to sort it all out.

My Sunflowers~continued (enlarging a drawing)

This is the final result. All the pieces taped together. The dimensions came to approx. 26" x 14" . Apparently enlarging a small image to such a degree in this manner is not without a few pitfalls. If you look closely one piece doesn't line up well with the others and is off by close to 1/2". At first I thought I may have over-enlarged that one section but I doubt it. It may have been a simple matter of my sloppy scissor skills.

This was the first image before enlargement...6" x 3"

I've decided to move ahead with the sunflower painting. I took the original image, removed unnecessary detail and applied edge detection to get a fairly simple line image. At that point I chose to enlarge the image to about 25" x 14". I don't own a projector so I used my combination printer/scanner. I think most printer/scanners have the ability to reduce or enlarge an image but I've found mine will lose resolution if I try to enlarge too much all at once and so began a rather laborious process.

My original printout was 6" x 3". I cut it in half and scanned each half, then enlarged each by 100% and printed a copy. That was quite a jump in size and things had begun to fade so I traced over all the lines with a .05 Micron pen before beginning the next round of scans. For the next scan I cut each half in 1/2, enlarged all 4 pieces by 25%, took the new pieces and enlarged them by 25% and for the final scan I cut each of the 4 pieces in half making 8 pieces and enlarged each by 75% which gave me the desired final size. Sounds complicated and confusing but it's really not. My scanner bed is standard size...8.5" x 11" so the cutting was an unfortunate necessity but it got the job done. It also helped a great deal to take the time and go over the second copy with the Micron pen. I didn't have to repeat that process again, thankfully. Now I have to tape all the final enlarged images together to create the completed 'drawing' and transfer to tracing paper.


Note: I numbered the back of each section so I would know what went where when it came time to put this puzzle together. I'm glad I did.

The Sunflowers

After applying the watercolor filter I converted the resulting image to black & white and switched it to infrared. I like the extreme variation of values. The brightest brights are well distributed throughout the image and create some interesting shapes. The darks make everything else pop. My intention is to break the original image down into more simple basic shapes without obliterating all the texture. I may take it even further. I kinda like that stormy looking sky in the background, too. I could title this Storm Flowers.

I applied the watercolor filter to the original. I didn't want too much effect so I kept the shadow at zero, texture at 3 and the brush set at 13.

The original image

Most every artist that paints florals has painted at least one sunflower but I never have. Maybe it's time I did. Like pears, sunflowers tend to be a very popular subject. I saw Vera Dennen's sunflowers on her blog and it reminded me of a photo I took several years ago of a stand of sunflowers I grew in one of my gardens. I liked this photo because I took advantage of their extreme height and shot the picture at an upward angle so the background showed nothing but blue sky and a few wispy clouds. I put the photo into Elements and cropped it, then played around with the filters hoping to get ideas for a new or different spin on the subject. These images are some of my results.

Oil & Watercolor~continued

Here is the result of a mixture of silver oil based enamel paint and watercolor/fluid acrylic poured onto damp w/c paper. Pretty dramatic, wouldn't you say? I thought so.

A closeup of a really cool passage.

One more closeup.

This is the result after dropping silver oil based enamel into wet watercolor on paper. The enamel tended to push the watercolor away and create it's own blooms on the surface.

This is gold metallic oil paint thinned with mineral spirits, then premixed with a watercolor/fluid acrylic mixture and poured onto damp paper. I couldn't get a very good photo but I was pleased that the thinned paint dispersed much better on the surface. The look is much softer IRL and the closest to Ann Blockley's results.

Instead of dropping the oil based paint onto wet paint/paper I premixed it with my watercolor/fluid acrylic and poured it onto damp paper. It formed this scroll work all on it's own.

I continued to experiment with the oil based paint today. In all the trials I used #140 CP Fabriano Uno w/c paper as a substrate. All of my results were interesting and created varying effects. Some of my water based mixtures were straight watercolor, some with fluid acrylics added. This is not something I would try during the winter months due to fumes and lack of proper ventilation.

Observations: I noticed if I wanted to manipulate the oil paint on my paper I needed to do it as soon after applying as possible. Otherwise I wound up with slightly congealed (and partially solid) masses or 'islands' of oil paint floating on the wet surface that broke apart in a very unattractive way when I tried to use a bamboo skewer to disperse them.

Also I mixed my oil paint/watercolor combos in those flimsy mini yogurt cups. Next time I will find something sturdier as the oil based paints will dissolve the bottoms of these containers in fairly short order.

Oil & Watercolor

This afternoon I decided to try Ann Blockley's technique of applying oil based metallic paint onto wet watercolor. My first attempt was an abysmal failure. My paper was too wet, I had too much pigment on it which wound up on me, on my worktable, everywhere and the oil paint just floated around on the surface, threatening to slide off the sides of the paper if I made a wrong move. This time I tried less water/pigment and used a spritz bottle of water to get the pigment to move taking the metallic paint along with it. I used a bamboo skewer to dot on the oil based paint and coax it a bit in some places. I'm not entirely happy with my second try but it's much better than the first. I'm wondering if I should thin the oil paint a little. I'm not getting the same results as Ann even though I do like the effect I did achieve. I want it to disperse more and not produce such a heavy layer on the paper when dry. One benefit of the oil paint...it is permanent. When they are dry, you can easily go back in with more pigment around oil based metallics to deepen values or adjust color. I also have a can of silver enamel I may experiment with. I think this is a technique worth pursuing as the effects created make dramatic backgrounds when done well.

Mice Dreams~ Completed

I need to stop working on this right now before I tweak it to death. Sometimes you just have to put the brush down and walk away. I have no idea what I will title this either. I'll worry about that later. The overall look of this is softer IRL but this image is fairly close.

Note: Margaret Bartlett has suggested a title and I think it works. 'Mice Dreams'

Last Sepia Cat~ Update

This guy needs some gouache whiskers, ear hairs and a few edges need softening. I tried another crop but found I like this one best. I think I won't even try to finish off the right (viewer's right) side but leave it to trail off into white paper. Wish I had made note of the reference source so I could give the photographer credit for a great photo.

WIP~Last Sepia Cat...

...for now anyway. This is as far as I got today on the final painting. I threw my neck out so I made a visit to my chiropractor and I'm taking it easy until tomorrow. I decided to create a small series of 3 cats. I'm not sure what to title the first or just leave it as 'The Sepia Cat'. I think I will change 'Bored' to 'Pensive' or 'Lost in Thought' and I'm not sure what I will call this one. I don't want to title it 'Sleeping Cat'. Too obvious. These are fairly small paintings. The Sepia Cat is barely ACEO size, the others are larger but not that much. I'll be taking high resolution photos of all three, uploading them to my Imagekind gallery and purchase medium size (approx. 16" x 8 1/2") prints which I will then mat myself for sale at the gallery. Until I know if these will sell or not I'm not paying to have them professionally scanned and printed. This should save me a lot of time, money and hassle and Imagekind's prints are very high quality.

Speaking of Imagekind, they are not in my good graces right now. I had already uploaded the first cat to their site and ordered 2 prints this past Saturday. Sunday I received an email notification that they were offering free shipping w/promo code over the weekend. I couldn't reach them by phone so I emailed them to let them know what happened and hopefully get the shipping charges knocked off my order. A rep. was quick to reply, informing me that because my order was less than $30 there was nothing they could do. (Btw, there was no minimum order listed on their promo to qualify for free shipping). Also since the late arrival of the notification was not my fault I felt it would be good business to at least give me a credit on my next order in the amount of the current shipping charges and I sent an email to this affect. So far, I've gotten no reply. }:(


Note: I just received a reply from Jill, the rep. from Imagekind. Apparently there was a $30 minimum order required for free shipping. She did say she asked her manager if they could give me a credit but the answer was 'no'.

Bored

I'm not bored but this cat sure looks bored. I liked my Sepia cat enough to try another. I did use a reference photo this time (courtesy of Yod Barro on Wetcanvas) and it shows, IMO. I think it's lacking the same spontaneity as the first painting because I focused on the photo too much. I love the reference photo but the cat's head is at a tricky angle so I needed guidance with the eye placement. However, once that was established I probably should've put the ref away. I used the same palette...DS Undersea green and warm sepia with white gouache added for the whiskers and the catchlight in the eye.

I tried two different crops...one closeup and one vertical and narrow with the subject at the very bottom. I think I like the second best. It's different.

Photographing Eggs

I like this composition the best so far. Love the subtle orangey reflection on the green egg shell and the angle of the shadow from the carton.

Is not as easy as I thought it would be. I have six lovely eggs from a friend's hens. The reddish brown eggs are from her Isa Brown hen, the green are from one of her Araucanas. Sunlight has been at a premium here lately and when it peeks out it doesn't stay long so it's a rush to shoot in good lighting. Since I had the eggs in the frig they immediately began to 'sweat' once they hit warm air and eggs tend to roll around a lot! No hiding a piece of masking tape under them to hold in place either as the surface of the shells was too wet. Once they came to room temperature I had lost any hope of decent light but I did get a few shots w/o all the condensation on the shells.

Say Cheese!

I've never done this on my blog before but this cheese is soooo good I couldn't help myself. I'm hooked on this stuff. I hope Heini's doesn't mind that I knicked their photo but hey...it'll promote their product. It's called Heini's Vidalia Onion cracker cheese. This cheese is to die for on Roasted Garlic Triscuits. Add red grapes and you have the best lunch ever on a hot, muggy summer day. Heini's is a company that uses Amish milk for their products. No growth hormones, purchased from small (5-6 cow) dairy farms....very healthy and 'green'. My local Spartan store sells it for less than the price on the website so Heini's must sell in bulk to grocery chains. If you're a cheese lover request it at your local grocery store now.

First Chicken

Done on the last piece of scrap paper with the last of the leftover paint...mostly quin violet, Undersea green and warm sepia with some gouache added for the white feathers. Forgive the blue and green blobs at the bottom. They were already there when I started. I hate to waste anything, especially if I can use the materials for practice. I've got some eggs from this very chicken in my frig which I intend to photograph and paint so for me the age old question, "Which came first? The chicken or the egg?", has been answered.

The Sepia Cat

I can't seem to stop playing in the paint lately! I've been using up leftover paint and bits and pieces of w/c paper lying around. This is another of my attempts to paint a cat without benefit of a prior pencil sketch or reference. I did rough in the right eye(viewer's right) but the rest is all done freehand. I mixed up some warm sepia with DS Undersea green and just winged it. I ran out of room on the paper so sadly this poor cat has no ears. I recently ordered some gouache and a fine line Sumi drawing brush from DS. I love this brush! The gouache came in handy for the whiskers, too.

Texture

I'm calling this 'Sunset on Pluto'. I don't know if Pluto even has a sun much less a sunset but that's what popped into my head when this was dry.

Love the little tendrils the paint forms working wet into damp. Nick Simmons calls them dendrites(sp?).

Here I didn't wait for the dried perm yellow to fully reconstitute before pouring. After the painting was dry I brushed away the tiny 'chunks' of paint to reveal what I thought looked like a field of yellow daisies.

Even though watercolor has the ability to be reactivated on the palette after drying , some colors like cerulean blue like to remain in nugget form no matter how much water you add so I left them on the paper. I liked the look! I think I also see the ubiquitous cat hair that seems to show up in all my paintings.

One of my favorite tricks to create texture involves spraying a fine mist of water over (not directly on) damp paint. This creates tiny blooms that add a neat effect. I'm not sure if it's visible in this image, tho. The purple you see is Dioxazine Purple fluid acrylic by Da Vinci. I applied it straight from the bottle onto wet paper. After it was dry I dripped on some cerulean blue watercolor, fully reconstituted. Applied onto the dry fluid acrylic, it retained it's vibrancy and it's semi-opaque qualities created a really cool passage in the painting.

Here fluid acrylic is interacting with straight watercolor, wet into damp. It's fun to play with your paint and you can learn a great deal in the process.

When you mention watercolor I doubt most people immediately think 'texture'. Sure, you can take a brush and recreate texture...the textures found in nature, in man made objects, etc. What I find intriguing is the exciting and often times unexpected textures that simply happen when working with watercolor. I'm also discovering that those same wildly interesting textures can be achieved with fluid acrylics used as watercolors.

I had some yogurt cups on the shelf in my studio that contained long dried watercolor from a pour I had done last year. I almost threw them out as there was nothing but a thin crust of dry paint left in them. Then I thought ...well, I'll try to reconstitute them and see what happens. When I think texture in watercolor I think of Ann Blockley's book, Watercolour Textures . I've referred to this book on my blog more than once. Her beautifully textured backgrounds in the book make her subjects almost incidential....almost. Somehow she manages to balance the subject matter and the background so the subject is not lost but rather enhanced by it. Anyhoo, I'm posting my results with the dried paint. No subject, just lots of pouring to see what happens.

Side note: Speaking of backgrounds...I received my August issue of Watercolor Artist yesterday. On the cover is a beautiful painting of bearded irises by Heidi Lang Parrinello. The actual painting is large...60" x 40", the attention to detail and skill involved in painting these irises is undeniable and must be stunning to see IRL but I have one problem with it...the background. I can only assume the problem lies with the crop for the cover but the over abundance of colorful and amorphous shapes in her background is extremely distracting and not only is it distracting but also looks so contrived. I suspect she did one heck of a lot of lifting to achieve that effect, too. I enjoyed looking through her portfolio on her website. She does seem to like busy backgrounds.

Midnight in the Moon Garden I

Moon gardens have fascinated me since I first became aware of them. Probably because I tend to be nocturnal. They are basically a color themed garden, employing both white/light colored blooming and foliage plants that seem to 'glow' when lit by moonlight. In my experience these gardens are both dramatic and ethereal, especially during a full Moon. I worked the second shift at my prior job and in the summer I looked forward to coming home to a garden I could enjoy late at night when it was cool and quiet.

This was my attempt to capture the unique beauty of these gardens. I saturated both sides of Fabriano #140 HP paper, poured on DV indigo fluid acrylic straight from the bottle along with Prussian and cerulean blue watercolor and tipped my paper in different directions to allow the paints to mingle. Before the fluid acrylic could dry I lifted out the petals of a few blooms with an oval brush, then added more detail with soft pastel. I like how the blooms seem to float which is exactly how they appear in the garden at night. The stems are 'lost' in the darkness and all the white blooms seem to hover in mid-air.

Landscape w/small rant

I'm calling this Twilight Time. It started out as nothing more than a way to use up excess paint on my palette and turned into a landscape in the process. I'm fighting the urge to criticize it to death and instead just let it be what it is.

Landscapes are not my forte but I've hit a point in my journey as an artist where I'm not satisfied with my work anymore (it's happened before, btw) so I need to stretch. I'm not saying I don't like my past work but I've reached a point where I'd like to take it to a new level. What level remains to be seen. Maybe I'm a victim of the caprice of my own moods which has lead to this recent dissatisfaction but irregardless, it's a chance to grow and explore with paint and paper.

I reached one goal last year which was to 'loosen up'. Now I want to become more expressive. I want my emotions to enter the picture (no pun intended) and not strive to simply recreate the emotions of my subjects. What better vehicle to convey my own emotions/moods than landscapes? I read a thread on Wetcanvas yesterday, started by a member that was in the process of taking a workshop from Alvaro Castagnet . This quote (the member quoting Castagnet) caught my eye:

"What makes a painting? A painting is a vision. Don't copy the subject. Representational artists run a huge risk of becoming illustrators. Illustration is not art. As artists, we have to capture something beyond that. We all can fall into the illustration trap, and the more we know, the harder it gets to stay out of that. We are constantly battling craft vs. art. Craft is illustration. A painting should reflect your spirit. Art is spiritual and there are no rules. Illustration is second hand art. If you are too literal, there is no enjoyment in the painting.

If you think using your intellect is the answer in painting, you're wrong. Painting is intuitive. It cannot be learned mechanically. Painting is about capturing the intrinsic side of life, with it's mood and feeling. There are no shortcuts and no formula. Painting is based on insight and perception, not logic. If the painting lacks ambience, it is worthless. The mood is the only creative side of representational art. The painting has to have magic to it. Search for the surprising element of the day. Paintings shouldn't be "pleasant" or "pretty"; they have to have GUTS. If we try to just copy nature and be illustrators, nature will beat us every time. We need to look deeper than that."

For the record, I don't agree with everything Castagnet had to say but some of his views did ring a personal bell with me. I thought by loosening up my style I would automatically become more expressive but that didn't seem to be the case. Even though I've changed my way of applying paint, I don't get a sense of heart and soul in my work. OMG, I think I'm going all artsy fartsy! I'm not giving up my cats, especially Crabby Cat, no matter how far afield I may wander.

Just Sketching

I'm on the hunt for inspiration at the moment. Although we are getting some much needed rain, these grey days are taking the wind out of my sails. I did find the cutest photo of two cats snuggling together on Paint My Photo, posted by Kathleen and I decided to use it for a sketch. Lately I've been using tracing paper in place of drawing paper just in case I like the sketch enough to pursue it further and decide to transfer it to working paper. Tracing paper is cheaper than good drawing paper, it can be drawn on easily enough and holds up to erasing remarkably well plus there's no need to trace my drawing, then turn around and transfer it to my working paper. It saves a step.

The challenge here was to fix an area of the larger cat's face where it meets the head of the kitten. In the photo the eye closest to the viewer is kind of smooshed and distorted so it needed some tweaking. Once again, I'm posting this mostly for my own benefit to see if my changes 'read' correctly.

Lily-of-the-Valley Commission~watercolor on gesso

I've finally completed this commission and will send it on to it's new home soon. I spent most of my time battling the effects of humidity. I've found nothing behaves normally when the dewpoint is way up. The gesso fought me because it refused to get to the 'sticky' stage where all the neat textures appear and my paper buckled repeatedly. Nothing that couldn't be dealt with, tho. My customer is happy and that's what counts.

Syd 2

My work area is currently covered in work that has buckled because of the unusually high humidity we've been experiencing. Everything is weighted down under glass and books to keep it flat until this weather passes so I decided to add a background to my Sydney Revisited painting while I wait. Of course once my brush was wet I felt the need to tweak Syd, something I don't recommend when doing a loose style watercolor painting. I don't think I did too much damage but some of the spontaneity was lost. My mantra for loose style paintings: "get in, get out and don't go back unless you absolutely have to".

Art vs Oil Spill: Artful Products at Zazzle for Save the Gulf-Wild Life Rescue

Paul Jackson has offered artists a way to do something about the Gulf of Mexico. He has set up a Zazzle store where you can buy products with the proceeds going to the Wildlife rescue. Here's a link to the online store, there are 18 new products in just the first day, so please take a look. Zazzle store link

This online Zazzle store features a collection of artwork donated by artists around the world specifically to benefit wildlife rescue operations along the Gulf Coast in the wake of the BP oil spill disaster. Proceeds from your purchase will benefit an organization that is all volunteer and they will use the funds where they can do the most good. The name of the organization is Wildlife @Rehabilitation & Nature Preservation Society, Inc. or WRANPS. TIN is 64-0701440. They were formed in 1983 and are a 501(c)3. Their info can be verified on Guidestar, the official website that monitors US Non-Profits. They are also registered with the Secretary of State of MS as a Charity. Their address is P O Box 209; Long Beach, MS 39560. Please feel free to donate to them directly! Make checks payable to Wildlife Rehabilitation & Nature Preservation Society, Inc. or WRANPS. P O Box 209; Long Beach, MS 39560. (in the note/subject line of your check, please include "art vs oil spill") Attn: Jan Dubuisson Thank you for all that you can do to help!!

Lily-of-the-Valley~Revisited 1

I had planned to redo my painting, Lily-of-the-Valley and as luck would have it someone contacted me recently to do another version as a commission so I've been playing around with the theme. This is not the final but I liked the antique look well enough to post it. It reminds me of an old botanical. This is also on gessoed paper.

Sydney Revisited

I'm currently working on a commission on gessoed paper. The humidity level here has been unusually high lately and the gesso seems like it's taking forever to dry. It's like waiting for grass to grow.}:( In the meantime I felt the need to paint something so I used another of Kali's photos to paint Sydney, this time strickly watercolor...no pastel. This painting came together very fast and I found a new favorite color...DS Perylene Violet. So far I haven't met a Perylene I didn't like. It's possible to get a full range of values from them and they are great mixers as well.


p.s. I think Syd needs a background of some sort. Maybe just a few splatters.......