The weekend

Not too productive but quite fun.
Friday more sketching onto canvas.
Saturday caught the Michaelangelo show at SAM and sketched a 16th
century drawing based on an etching based on the Sistine Chapel ceiling!
Also saw a Venice painting for the Grand Tour tourists... Interesting
to see all of the buildings I recognize and be able to see what has
been built up in the centuries between.
Sunday just spent touring Vashon Island seeing lovely things to
paint ... Maybe next time!

Grrrr

Still no paint...
more scaffolding removal - wow I'm really going to know this church pretty well after all of this!

Still all prep no paint - but oh so close

2nd coat of gesso in the morning.

Started sketching Painting 4 onto canvas with charcoal - like my shot but lighting sucks but did find a good one on the interweb - so will try to translate the lighting from a slightly different angle into mine - should be a nice challenge - so much for simple. Hoped to start actually painting but adjusting to the new babysitter is a bit of a challenge - lots of tears for no reason at all.

My art pals are starting to arrive - watching the History of Impressionism together. So that's it for this evening.

More Pic Picks

Painting 3 - A Venetian Lion (Winged you know...) may have to do a few of these - so many lovely details to fiddle with, but would be so lovely loose....

Painting 4 - Santa Maria as a frosted cupcake - so many swirly fancy bits.
Painting 5 - Canal painting - maybe even with a gondola thrown in - the easiest of my multiple photo combos! Noticed him coming into scene so took closeup as well.

So that is my 5 - wow - now all I need to do is paint them.

Ok - now off to gesso a few canvases. On top of everything else I've got a commission as well!

Plugging away

Figured out missing parts of the church... should be able to start painting tomorrow.

Hungry?

One felt breakfast coming right up!

Delivered a very late Xmas present, so slight diversion from the painting.

Painting 1: Working out the missing building parts (as I said - some rig removal needed.) Prepping for attempt on smaller pad, not brave enough to attempt the big one yet!

Painting 2: Printed out photo refs - a cafe on Piazza San Marco. Combining 3 photos so need to work some stuff out - not sure if digital or analog will be more helpful so trying rough sketch tomorrow.

Need to choose something quicker and less painful for painting 3!

Painting 1 - test sketch

The Challenge

A good bit of stuff has been worked on and 2 tiny paintings completed since the last post - none of it blogged about of course. I've had a good run of art everyday since December - only missed a few, and some days were only 3 one minute sketches, or reading art books in the tub....but hey, that counts too!

But now I have a challenge... am I up for it? No idea, but I'm going to try anyway!

5 paintings in 6 weeks

Rick and I are going to apply for a show based on our trip to Venice. He's of course already got his 10 best photos picked out and ready to burn to CD. I've managed to go through my 1046 reference photos and narrow it down to a few hundred to paint! Since I didn't have any time to do any sketching there, I figured I could relive the trip and do it from here.

Painting 1: Santa Maria della Salute and Dogana di Mare from Piazza San Marco

This one is actually a collaboration. Rick took the photo and I'll be doing the "rig removal and color correction". You'll see when I post the reference picture.

This was going to be a large watercolor, but then I realized that my transfer paper marks are not erasing like they did from my test sheet, so now I'll be doing a mixed media with acrylics. It's been something I've been meaning to try anyway... so now I have to!

For you "purists" - yes I can draw, I just prefer to spend my painting time painting and unless you're also trying to make art while taking care of a small child then I don't think you have a right to judge! So there! :P