The Coming Year

Watercolor
11 x 7

As the year comes to an end you can expect all the year in review shows complete with predictions for the coming year. No predictions here from me. You don't want to know what I think is coming, trust me on that. As for what's past, if you've been keeping up you've already seen most of it, so just flip back on your own. I had thought about going back several years to let you decide if I'd shown any improvement, but due to a technical problem I can't get to any old files stored on my zip disks. So you dodged that bullet too.

One of the few files I can get to right now is this little watercolor. It struck me as a relatively good image to end up the year on. Is she watching something / someone go, or waiting for something / someone to come? Maybe she's had a really bad year and is getting ready to jump. What you take from a piece depends a lot on what you bring to it, doesn't it?

To my reader(s) I hope you're not getting ready to jump. I wish you all a good new year and remember the trick is to keep your head when those around you are losing theirs.

Head Studies

A few months ago there was a discussion of the working methods of William Bouguereau at one of the forums I visit regularly. That struck me as pretty interesting. I'm personally not a huge fan of Bouguereau, but I have to admit that the man knew how to handle paint. As a result I thought it would be a good idea to try a study or two and see if I could come away with some added knowledge. There was one problem though, there didn't seem to be any agreement of how exactly he did it. I've never seen one in person so that made it even harder to decide for myself who was right or at least closest to right. After a few weeks of discussion and one side arguing for one way and another side offering arguments for a different approach I finally decided it didn't matter that much to me. But by then I'd already dug through my saved files and found a couple Bouguereauish poses courtesy of the lovely faestock from Deviant Art link . I had them drawn on the panels and was already to go. So I just decided to do them the way I normally would. Here are the results. Both are not much more than sketches and are unfinished. They could be polished quite a bit more, and brought to a higher degree of finish, but I don't know that that would really add much. Besides I'd done all I'd set out to do.


Oil on Panel
12 x 10
SOLD


Oil on Panel
10 x 8
SOLD

I think this is the better of the two. For all you paint freaks out there that like to get up close here's a couple details.





All in all I think I may go back to the original idea and see if I can do a convincing Bouguereau study. The man could push paint around.

Dusk

Oil on Panel
8 x 12

Another of the little landscapes I'm playing with at the moment. A very simple little image hopefully expressing the peaceful, quite time just as the sun is going down. I don't really know what else to say about it. It will have to speak for itself.