Category — Inspiration

On Saturday morning I went to the Duke Lemur Center and did their Walking with the Lemurs tour. It was pretty neat. I got to hang out with some ring tailed lemurs while they ate for probably 30mns or so, but it felt like 5mns. I am considering doing the tour again with a different type of lemur.

I painted this lemur after the tour. There are also some photos below.

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This is the first painting I’ve done in 2010 that is larger than 5×7.  This one is 12×16 oil on canvas. I am mostly done, but I do have one more session planned for the kind of tweaking that can’t be achieved wet on wet. [Read more →]

I think I am done with this little 5in by 7in painting. I never know for sure…sometimes I decide to tweak things down the road, but I am pretty happy with the result of this one. It was great green mixing practice because other than the pink petals peeking out it is a very limited palette.

Peeking Pink Petals | 7" x 5" | Oil on Linen Panel

One of the fun things about this painting is that I actually took photographs of this piece and different stages to share.

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The final two weeks were quite some time ago, so I thought I would finally post the last items so I have a complete set. Here is a photo from the very last class.

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The following are some photos from my trip yesterday to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Lots of flowers plus some of the dog and some of Robert. I love Spring in North Carolina. Actually, I love Spring everywhere…

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I am now half way through the winter figure drawing session at the Durham Arts Center so I thought I would post some of the sketches from the last two sessions. Still very much enjoying myself. I acquired some new pencils with some birthday gift money I received and I had fun working with those. I am also finding that I enjoy working with two types of charcoal: willow and compressed. It’s an easy way to get different values as you might notice in the session four sketches.

Before I move on to the sketches, here are some daffodils from my back yard the other day. They seem to come up around my birthday every year, which is a nice treat. However they always seem to get a cold shock and  whither quickly. I like the focus in this photo on just one flower thanks to my amazing 50mm prime lens I got for xmas.

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I brought my camera on the Buckquarter Creek Trail last week. My intention was to find the two trees my mom and I saw in October that she wanted a photo of. I could not find them. All I have to say is: you try going into the woods and finding the same trees twice!

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The other week I felt inspired to paint some pistachios. Not sure if I’m done with the painting yet, but it’s been a while, so I thought I would post my progress. If I work on them some more, I will probably post the revision. But I didn’t really intend this 5×7 to be a drawn out process. Pistachios have an amazing range of color and at the time, the sun was hitting them in an interesting way. [Read more →]