Recent Portrait

Age Nine

 16" x 20", Acrylic on Canvas

Not for sale

After finishing my oldest son's portrait I am still perplexed on how to properly show freckles.  I hope I captured his sunny disposition and generally irreverent attitude.  His light skin made shading a challenge for me and I am still not completely happy with how it turned out. My son seems to be very pleased with it and had asked me if we were getting posters made of it so he could give them away.  That seems like a fairly good review. 

I had photographed each step of his painting from start to finish as well, but wasn't sure what the interest would be in another review essentially like the first one.  I am currently preparing for piece centered around the microcystin issue that the City of Toledo had last summer that I have been sketching out ideas for since it happened and will likely make that one into another series of step by step entries in the coming months. 

Winter 2015

 12" x 12", Acrylic on Board

Button Coming Soon! 

So far this winter here in Ohio we've had two big snows and during the latest one I was able to get out and get some pictures of the drifts at sunset.  I always enjoy trekking around in the growing twilight trying to capture a shot at just the right angle.  This painting is a small part of my backyard under about six inches of snow followed by a small amount of freezing rain.  

This piece was an experiment on a number of levels.  I had been given some scrap pieces of one by four foot composite board  by a friend (Thanks, Joel!). I cut them down into one by one foot boards for determining if they would accept gesso evenly and if they would warp after being covered with gesso.  This is a problem I have encountered from the past and didn't want to do any complex pieces on a boards with the chance of warping so I used the remaining paints from my son's portraits to paint this small piece.  

I also wanted to play around with much less medium, much higher pigment amounts and longer working times in order to determine if I would be able to paint any faster with less intermediate layers.  Arbitrarily, I gave myself a goal of finishing this small piece in a week, which for me, is fairly quick.  I am pleased to say that I was able to finish it in just about five days and was partially pleased with the result.  In a coming piece, I tried to match my previous five day mark with a slightly more complex painting I made using the remaining paints from my son's portraits.