October 2015

I'm back in my painting class and as I expected, our first project was to paint something to be used as a holiday card. Ron chooses to do it in September to give everyone plenty of time to figure out how to get it printed and sent out. Since we had just returned from our Mammoth trip, I didn't have much time to think about a subject, but I remembered that last year I had downloaded several online images as potential cards, and I liked this one of two horses and a rider in the snow. The image was of a painting, but I just searched again and I can't find it, so I'm sorry that I can't give credit to the artist who inspired this.

I finished the painting of the horses in the snow halfway through my second class so I started another one. I have lots of photos from our Mammoth trip that could become paintings, but I chose to do one of a little cabin at the site of the Mammoth Consolidated Mine. Old buildings always appeal to me and I wanted to give some of the feel of the eastern sierra lodgepole pine forest. I think I got it pretty good.

The next project for my class was supposed to be a fall scene. Past experience told me that Ron would probably work from an image that didn't do much for me, so I found one of my photos from a trip we took in the late 90s. We spent a few days camped just outside of Durango, Colorado, and did some hiking in the San Juan Mountains. The aspens were so beautiful. My photo was a wide-angle portrait format, so I just added trees to the sides to make it even more wide-angle. It makes the woods look more open than they were, but I wanted to include some of the clouds and distant mountains. I think it turned out pretty good.

September 2015

 We spent five days in a little cabin by a lake at Mammoth Lakes, so I missed the first day of the fall session class of my painting class. I'll probably be painting some scenes from our trip in the near future, but I needed something to paint for the second week of my class, and I chose a photo of our cat, Sunny, on one of the patio chairs in our back yard. She spends much of her day there, keeping a eye on the birds and sleeping. Sunny was a feral cat at the barn where we used to board our horses. We adopted her about 6 years ago, and it took lots of time for her to get used to living with us, but now she is very relaxed and affectionate. I wanted to focus my painting on her rather than the background, so I let it fade to white paper around the edges. I had never tried that before, but I think it worked out quite well.