Food for Thought

"Food for Thought" 8x8 inches, acrylics on illustration board. Genre, fantasy.

The painting started out smaller, but it was too small to frame, so I glued it onto another illustration board, thereby adding a border. It can be framed as is, without glass. Note the heart shaped by the bird's head, the girl's elbow, and the greenery to the side of her.

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BTW I'm starting a campaign to get artists credited, especially when people share paintings on Facebook. Feel free to use this... it's signed. Or make your own and sign it. Writers get credited when they are quoted. Let's have the same respect for artists!

"Tears for Captain Onion" Lady Ship Sea TBARTS

"Tears for Captain Onion" 5x7 acrylics on Everlast panel

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Inspired by Carol Marine's onion paintings, I decided to try my hand at onions. So I slipped one into my Funny Hat series. Then I added the ship, then the tear, and lo! a story seemed to loom on the horizon.

Her dress is done like an onion, and the earring and the moon echo the onion theme. I did find the onion challenging to paint, but it sure was fun and I'm ready to go again. I'm planning one with a red onion.

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Persephone's Flower

SOLD

"Persephone's Flower", acrylic on illustration board, 5x7. I'm putting this one into a show called 5x7 in Austin TX.  I'd like to do a bigger version on canvas. The theme of the bird headed lady is one I have done repeatedly.

Added another layer of glaze to the iris still life. The background looks fine with a coat of burnt sienna over the yellow, and I'm stopping on it and will continue with the still life itself. It's good these things dry so slowly, it helps prevent overdoing it.

I have rededicated myself to DRAWING because it's such a big important part of painting. The better I draw, the better I paint. It saves time & money too because I waste less paint when I am in practice for drawing. So I'm in a lifedrawing class for the next few weeks, and have resolved to keep showing up at local lifedrawing practice studios.

Jester with an Egg

Acrylic, 8 x 10 on canvas. Don't have a name for it yet (any suggestions?). It's a jester, walking through a cave, holding an egg. This one also has cutouts on it (like the previous one) and that's the LAST time I ever glue on a cutout piece of canvas. Too hard to finesse the edges!

This one is glazes over an underpainting. Love painting that way; the more I do it the easier it gets. Helps a lot with values (although I am a Libra I appreciate values and value them highly).

Trying like crazy to keep up with blogging after a schedule change. Also I don't paint fast enough (yet) to post more often, so I'll have to throw in a WIP or two from now on. Thanks for tuning in to this blog.

EFT and the Curse of the Mummy

Illustration Friday: Wrapped

"Mummy" acrylic on 9x12 canvas

When I was a kid I had a mummy phobia as a result of seeing some unwrapped mummies in a museum. Although it faded when I grew up, there has always been a little bit of it left, so I decided to use Emotional Freedom Techniques to see if I could completely resolve it. EFT is a combination of psychology and acupressure. Very thorough instructions are available as a free download from their website. Very interesting process; I've used it on several other issues and I'm very impressed with it.

Anyways I tapped through several rounds of EFT to work on dissolving this phobia. To test it, I googled Mummies and spent an hour or two finding out all about them from little baby mummies to bog people to unravelled pharaohs. Didn't feel a thing! And afterwards forgot about it. Didn't dream about it that night. Hey, this worked pretty good.

Then I started this painting. I purposely gave it a face more in line with mummy portraits than a real mummy because my genre is whimsy, not horror. Anyways I like the irony of a pretty face painted on the top of the whole bundle. Once I finished the painting, I started to scan it, and my face began breaking out with a bright red rash. So once more, I did several rounds of EFT tapping and took the rash down to where my face looked normal again. Couldn't help but wonder if this was some sort of coincidental body memory involved with the mummy phobia, so I factored that into my EFT tapping rounds. Turned out I remembered how embarrassed I was to be afraid of mummies. Mortified, if you'll pardon the pun. I guess the embarrassment must be gone because otherwise I wouldn't be telling the world all about this.

About the painting: it is on a very fine grained all media canvas. I glued some regular canvas on it; you can see where it's got some collage pieces glued on--the Mummy itself and the staff it is holding plus a few others. I've got one more painting underway where I glued a cutout piece canvas over it, and then no more of that. Too hard to paint it, because I tend to change my mind in the course of the painting.

I did an underpainting with violet oxide and glazed over it with pthalo turquoise, cadmium red light, and yellow ocher. When I wanted to add white I used zinc white, because it is translucent and makes a good glaze white. I'm pretty satisfied with the color harmony of this painting. And I might even do more Mummy themed paintings.