Hello? I'm not dead. :)

My blog has been in a coma, but I've still been doing creative stuff. Mostly for school though....I paint with some friends sometimes and they work in oils so one day in February I decided to fool around. I've used oils before but with cats and kids it's difficult plus I just love watercolor. The brush was just too fussy and my painting was looking very sad so I switched to the palette knife. Fun!  It took weeks to dry. 

Lucky for me my friend was having a workshop and I sold it before it was finished! 

Cherry Blossoms  11 x 14 masonite

Alphonse Mucha Inspired Self Portrait

I've been taking an Illustration class for the past 11 weeks. A lot of it has been done in Adobe Illustrator but when I can I've done the project in watercolor. This is the last one. We had to do a self-portrait. What I've enjoyed about this class is the tremendous amount of freedom we've had with the projects. Basically the assignment was do a self-portrait however you want. Text optional. I did an Alphonse Mucha inspired project for another class and used my daughter for the model. This time I did me. I did this one pretty small so I could get it done today but I have a much larger painting in the works. Maybe I'll make myself smile a little bit better on that one...

Goldfinch

I can't believe it's been two months since I've posted. Been really busy with school and I will start posting some of the work I'm doing. For now, here's a cute goldfinch that I'm teaching my watercolor class.

Peppermints

I painted these candies as a lesson for my watercolor class this month. If you are interested in this project, I put together a 7 page pdf booklet and you can purchase it here.

New Watercolor - finally!

Here's a painting I recently finished of a white cat on a piano. I've really been wanting to explore textural effects. I've done it a bit here and there but am ready to keep moving forward with it. Right now I'm playing with textural backgrounds. I painted this cat realistically but I wanted to get some texture, value and shape in the background. I painted the background randomly with gesso to get the texture and then I just played around with the shapes and values until I got something I liked.

Illustration Friday "Swell"

How about a nice fat, feasting mosquito for Illustration Friday's topic "swell" (as long as it's not on me.) I tried to capture a feeling of the body starting to float up like a balloon and ready to pop!

Illustration Friday "Obsession"

Here is my illustration for IF's theme "Obsession". I love painting kids in costumes. I don't know why besides the fact that they're so cute. Maybe it's an obsession? I love the color green. Dragons/dinosaurs can be green. Boys like those things. Voila! 

To my regular readers, I'm sorry I haven't posted for 6 weeks. I didn't realize it had been so long. I've been pretty busy with lots of things and I took a vacation but I'm back and will try to get rolling again. :)