Happy New Year!

Festive greetings to all of my students and blog readers, I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful holiday season!

I'm looking forward to a creatively productive new year and am excited to be sharing my journey with you!  After spending the Christmas holiday at my family's farm in Virginia and having some quiet time to collect thoughts and generate new ideas, I've put together a plan for myself to stay more active on this blog, bring you all sorts of fun goodies like project inspiration and instructional videos, as well as develop new lessons for my workshops. 

My first project for the new year was to reorganize/decorate my studio, with the focus being on my main painting area and the goal being to arrange the layout in such a way that it will be more efficient for working on all of my various art projects.  I planned to move one of my big worktables over to the window to have better light in the daytime and shift the other table over a little bit to create more open areas against the walls for hanging art and inspiration boards...doing this forced me to pull out everything I stashed away under those worktables and decide what I was actually going to use vs could throw away or donate, what a task!

I'm much happier with the new layout and can't wait for my students to visit for workshops!  The first one of the year, Color Essentials, is on Saturday January 12!  Visit my workshops page for more details!

Being inspired by nature...

On a trip to the farmer's market the other day, I found this glorious little creature, a romanesco broccoli!  I couldn't wait to take one home and photograph it....

Anyone know a great recipe for the romanseco?  It's almost too beautiful to cook!

Experiments with OPEN Acrylics

I have the great opportunity every year to represent Golden Paints at a small trade show at Continental Art Supply in Reseda, CA for their annual Teacher Night.  For Teacher Night this year, I demo'd many of Golden's exciting products, including the OPEN paints.  Here is a sample image of a printmaking technique with the OPEN paints.  Due to their extended dry time, you can use them to simulate the look and feel of oil-based paint products.  During my Teacher Night demo I used a brush and worked some OPEN colors over a sheet of freezer paper then pulled two prints... the first (left) was made on a sheet of Strathmore Mixed Media paper that I had coated ahead of time with a thin layer of Soft Gel (you can use any sheen)...what came about was something that looks like a block print.  The image on the right was made on the same paper but uncoated with a gel, and dampened first with water so that more of the pigment would release on the print...the end result is something that looks more ethereal, like a stain of watercolor.  I just love how these images are so different but they share so many common traits.  I'm looking forward to printing more of these at home!

A little break...

I'm slowly returning to my regular schedule after having a successful art opening followed by my first mini-vacation since the holidays last year.  Before getting back to acrylic and art related posts, I thought I would share a selection of photos from the last few weeks!

Art Reception at the Jeremy Clark Salon

A few of the new paintings...working with a couple different styles, all from the same series of antique photographs

Some of my favorite shots from Bodie, CA

Yosemite National Park

New Works

I'll be showing some new paintings in a couple weeks and have been really excited with how the series is turning out.  After so many years of painting women, I'm now broadening my creative journey by now painting some men as well.  My hair stylist opened a great new spot and I jumped at the chance to some new work there... since the show is at a salon, I thought a great theme would be women being pampered paired with images of men that are dapper gentlemen.  Here is a peek of one of the new paintings for the show:

I'm having so much fun working from deguerrotypes of men and vintage photographs of women!  The new series will include several portraits as well as multi-figure paintings and some mixed media works.  I hope to see you there!!