September 16, 2009

Owen's Mural

Doing a marine theme for my friend Kaye. Her son Owen's birthday is in October (he will be 9). This is his birthday present.

DAY 1: Chalked out the sketches first. The dark blue made it super easy to see. Owen wanted a hammerhead shark, sting ray, sea turtle, Morey eel, coral, puffer fish, clown fish in anemone, sea snakes, and jellyfish, I added the octopus. The room has great wall space to work with and high ceilings. You can see today's progress. I wanted the shark life size. I really like the effect. His bed will be just below it.


The sting ray and coral are above his desk.

DAY 2: Finished! There are sun spots in some of the photos.






August 26, 2009

New Commissioned Paintings

Here is my initial sketch for the two 36"x48" canvases. I will be using the top sketch. The other canvas hasn't been started yet.


This is the top sketch set on it's side and cropped. I decided to add more flowers when I chalked it in on the canvas. I prepped the canvas with a grey base coat. It will add depth when I do the lighter colors on top. I will leave some of it showing around the flowers and leaves.


Here the flowers and leaves have been roughed in. I have started to go around them with creamy white. I will add more washes of color on top of the white later. And also add more highlights and shading to the flowers and leaves. I also enlarged the red tulip so it would point more towards the left of the canvas and not straight down. It seemed too similar to the smaller coral tulip to the right of the yellow flower. And I added a couple more leaves.



The client likes the art of Kim Parker so I am doing homage to her style with these two paintings. I am loving the colors and loose brush strokes.

I have decided since the client is going to hang this horizontally that I need to do a bit of editing to make the painting's composition more balanced. First of all, I am going to remove the sunflower closest to the edge of the canvas. Did a little photo editing below.

Here is today's progress (below). Colors are still needing to be tweaked. I think I like the basic shapes now. I changed some of the flowers today to balance the composition. And I added some more leaves and stems. I will probably start on the other painting Monday and then do the final touches on both of them at the same time.


Here are the two finished paintings. Several changes were made as the paintings progressed. The painting on the bottom here is the one shown above in the other photos.


July 23, 2009

Swaptree.com Contest Entry

Here is the same painting (above) reworked to make it a bit more colorful..


One of my favorite websites is swaptree.com. I use it to trade books, cd's, dvd's, & video games with other users. They are having a special contest this month to help get the word out about their site. This is the painting I did for their creative contest. Hope to win a Wii!!