Samples of lightning paintings. I like painting the elements, fire, wind, lightning. I also like water paintings. I prefer dark, moody colouring for some reason. Both of these are acrylic underlay with oils layered on top.

Mimes

I thought I should post these two again just to keep the mime series together.

Both are OSWOA (4" x 6") pieces. Unframed as always.

Need Reference photos?

Artists, do you need reference material. I found artmorgue.com. It's free to join, and it looks like it has a lot of material. (at least I hope it's a good site) Let me know if you have other sources that are good.

Marketing Poll to the right on the page.

I'm conducting a poll to see what drives you to do what you do. Do you try and figure out the market and paint or create accordingly? Or do you just do whatever inspires you and hope that you find a market for it. Or I guess some people just create and don't give marketing a thought.

I have tried to figure out what is popular at the moment, but am not always inspired to paint what it seems everyone wants. When I paint "popular" pieces they don't sell as well as pieces that truly inspired me. On the other hand, things I thought were masterpieces were complete failures.

Have you had the same experience?

Ballet Shoes

This is part of my "mime" pieces. All have been done with coloured pencil. I'm slowly getting the hang of them. Although I still can use the practise of blending.
This is also a 4" x 6" piece. This is the size I prefer although before Christmas I will have to get back into the 1 1/2" size for the doll house people. :)

Peach Lotus

I finished this piece tonight. It's an OSWOA of course! I was tired of painting pink water lilies so I decided to do a peach one.

Kingsmere Lake

Daughter Erica and grands at Kingsmere Lake. Accessable only by foot (or boat if you portage 1 1/2 kms)If you go by boat to the far end of this lake you can portage again to another lake and find Grey Owl's cabin and gravesite. On my "to do" list some day.

Portage Kingsmere Lake

We walked the old rail bed to the lake, but we did run into these fisherman who were portaging their boat to the river to fish at Kingsmere Lake. They left that boat and went back and got another one to portage. They gave the kids a ride on the railcar that they were pushing the boat on. It was really neat.

Kingsmere Wilderness

River connecting Waskesui Lake and Kingsmere Lake

Waskesui

Breakwater at Waskesui Lake

Here is a big bull elk grazing at the side of the road. He will be in rut in just a couple of weeks and no one will be getting this close to him after that. They are known to attack people, cars, and anything that in general pi....s him off during this time. The cows were all on the other side of the road. Some of the babies still had spots. His rak is about 3 months old. As soon as all the velvet is gone it quits growing. It grows about 1/2" per day.

Waskesui Lake. The weather was just lovely!

Lotus

I have this painting up on Ebay right now. I have a bid on it. I should go away more often, it helps sales LOL

Rain Rain Go Away :(

Well, what can I say. It rained, and rained, and rained some more. I don't have pics of sunsets, northern lights, loons or anything. I have photos of the waves pounding the breakwater, the fog, and the wet hike we did. LOL. We didn't get to Grey Owl's cabin and grave site. It was a 20 km hike (I'm not up to anything like that) and it was waaaaaaaaay to windy to rent a boat to go up there. Although we all said that we would definitely do it sometime. We did see a family of otters, elk, loons, deer and Jenn had a close encounter with a black bear in their campsite! I'll post some pics later.

Going North

We are leaving for Prince Albert National Park tomorrow (Sunday) for a few days. I can't wait to get there. I'm hoping the weather is good enough to get some sunset pics over Waskesiu Lake. With any luck we are also hoping to hike to Grey Owl's cabin. Although I'm not sure how long of a hike that is and we will have the grands with us. Back on Wednesday. Will post pics here if I get any decent ones.

Started some Cafe Press shops

I've started some CafePress Shops. Here's hoping something comes of it. I've had a bit of a hard time getting them in the right category (there must have been some sort of glitch in the system) but now they seem to be working.

Swan Lake

Another acrylic. I'm going to start stockpiling hoping for a Christmas rush.

More thanks.....

I also have to thank the great members over at CAAT (who were the first to embrace my art and myself) over on Ebay and the SFA (small format group) These groups are wonderful, especially for new artists who are just starting out and don't know their way around.

Thanks to all my online artist friends

I've learned so much in the last year or so from many many online artist friends. Special thanks to Dustie for getting me interested in the OSWOA movement. It is my absolute favourite format. Also thanks to all the members there who support and encourage everyone with kindness and laughter. Also special thanks to Eliza, whose patience never ceases to amaze me. She answers all my questions and never says they are dumb. She also so kindly made my Youtube for me.

Tea Time Bookmark

A bookmark that I painted a short time ago (acrylics)

Painting in the Moonlight?

One of my favourite acrylics. I did this a month or so ago. Another OSWOA of course :)

Sad Mime - Female

I did this with prismacolour pencils. It was one of my first attempts so I didn't use many colours. It is a 4" x 6" illustation. (OSWOA) Finished it the other day.