Trees in Belleville woods

This is the latest one that I just finished. The assignment was kindof hard for me to figure out. She wanted us to paint a landscape. But instead of trying to make it realistic and 3 dimentional, she wanted us to paint it on planes. Which meant to try to make it look 2 dimentional, to focus more on the forms that I could pull out of the photo instead of trying to make it look like what it actually was. The best way I could wrap my mind around it was to think of it as a quilt or paint by number...to simplify.
Anyhow, I don't think I actually did the assignment the way that she intended, but she said I succeeded. I'm good with that.
The photo that I painted from was from the trip that I blogged about not long ago that Elli and I took through the woods with Lois. It was a nice time, and now I have a painted memory.

Driftwood

Our first assignment in painting class is always a still life. Our teacher sets up a table full of junk and we have to pick something and paint it. Since I missed the first day of class, I got stuck with the driftwood. There was an old spoon hanging on it. Lovely. I tried to make the most of it.
Roots of an old tree can be kindof exciting, I'll admit. When Mike and I went to the Sequoia Ntnl Forest in CA, there were some pretty awesome roots!
So I painted it. Here's my end result. I didn't want to paint the cloth or teapot that sat behind it in the classroom, so I substituted a branch-y plant. I like it much better this way. I have enough paintings of fabric and stuff from previous classes. And I'm a little frustrated at my photo because of the glare from the sun in the upper left corner. It's distracting to me. I suppose I can try again later.
What do you think of my interpretation of driftwood?

A hiking we will go

Elli and I went out to Lois's house to play yesterday. It was a lot of fun. Elli really loved chasing and looking for the cat ("wh- a- oo?") , but got frustrated when we wouldn't let her pick her up. She fed Hank the horse a carrot right from her little hand, fed the ducks, some fish, and played with Darcy on our not-so little walk through the woods. I think she had a good time. She rode on my back all wrapped up through the woods, and fell asleep - which kindof made it nice that we didn't feel like we had to really hurry. Her poor little head bobbled around though. I hope that now that I am not working, I'll be able to take her out there on the weekends more often. It's really nice.
If you have seen my paintings that I posted, I changed the fern one so that it is more true to the color of the real painting. It looks a lot better.

Dyptich....not dip stick

Here's a couple of paintings that I meant to blog a long time ago too. These I did not offer up for sale last year. It is hard, now that I am seeing my photos on the screen, to give you the impression of what they really look like. They are very textured, bright, juicy looking grapefruit. They are meant to be hung together (a dyptich). It was done for an interior/exterior project. I took a real grapefruit, cut it in half and started painting it....literally, at one point I was painting the actual grapefruit. My grapefruit kept me company for the rest of the semester in suprisingly non-smelly or moldy condition.
I just finished another painting. Eventually I will get a picture up of it. Maybe in a few months. That's how long it took me here.

Painting

I meant to blog this, hmmm....forever ago. This is one of the paintings that I did last year (I named it "Fiddle Heads") and sold to the local community college. Pretty cool huh? Too bad that since they bought something last year, I'm not eligible for them to buy from again until next year. Oh well. I'm glad that I got some good pictures of it. (Thanks Lois)
On another note, I am making several things right now in the hopes of getting an etsy shop. I'll let you know when I do, so you can come buy cool handmade things from me!! :)