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A painting for Mother's Day 2016!

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Little bee, no swerving from your line when you deliver the goods back home.

A busy place with no door but when you enter you still use your buzzer.

Then back again from flower to flower, collecting the pollen that gives you power.

It’s home again, little bundles carried to feed the Queen

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©the enchanted easel 2014

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sapphire blue, to be exact.

working on Iris, September's mermaid this week. still slowly recovering from c spine surgery so i can't paint as quickly or as much as i'd like.

the nervous system never ceases to amaze me. especially how neck surgeries affect your arm and your hand. i guess that's why those neurosurgeons get paid the big bucks! they certainly deserve it! amazing how all that stuff works...

hoping to have beautiful little Iris done soon! :)

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A rare day-off for Lincoln's Birthday, the big kids all gone to friends' houses, and a little sunshine on the front patio means that my littlest can have fun playing out front while mom updates things on the laptop.

Spring flowers have already arrived.

Anyway, didn't I say I might just tweak the painting a little?  Well, that wasn't exactly true.  When it came down to it, I think I tweaked it a lot.  Of course, it may not look different but, with a little close observation, one might notice differences.  Frankly, I became frustrated with the 2 flowers on the right - they became rather muddled by overworking with to many colors - I even completely painted out the bottom one and started over.

I think it's done - but I'm still not happy with the leaf - I'll just tweak it a little...

Light was an interesting challenge as I had a changing light source (a south-facing window) to my left which caused moving shadows and a secondary interior light overhead/right which created shadows of its own.  I realized that I was giving conflicting information with cast shadows of the flower petals on both sides of the vase/creamer, but I liked the shapes and decided to keep them.  And that's what was truly liberating about this project compared with the first one which was much more dependent on observation.  For this one, I gave myself permission to use more artistic license and mostly responded to what was happening on the paper.  Besides liking the shapes of some of the shadows, I also liked the orange from the flowers reflected on the porcelain surface - it wasn't nearly as pronounced in real life, but I liked it in the painting.

I still have dreams of one do doing a "quick" little still life that captures its essence with a minimum of strokes... (sigh)

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Sketch.

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The painted owl belly cast is finished! I sculpted the flower from scratch (it's not a flower dipped in plaster) and am quite happy about how sturdy it feels, never having done sculpture before. The belly looks so beautiful, so amazing! The even more amazing part is when my doula, Suzanne Moquin (of Gentle Touch Birth Services), came for a visit today to help present it to the new mom, touched the cast and could feel how the baby had been positioned inside her body- where the bum and where the head was. So ridiculously amazing. What a way to capture your pregnancy, hey? Can hardly wait to get these casts professionally photographed!

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"Aster" - Flower of September

Yuppers, it's turnin' into autumn!

First thing's first...

The new Flower of the Month fairy for September is finished! It's been finished for a few weeks (sorry for my delay in posting). I have started November, she should be out by the end of September, if not the first week of October.

My Mama

My mother's birthday is in September, so any time I do a piece that has to do with Libra, September, Sapphire, or Autumn I tend to show features that resemble my mom.

She's a constant source of inspiration for me in the women I wish to show having courage and maturity. Plus, she has long gorgeous black hair. That inspires me EVERY time. :)

View the entire image and print listing on Etsy:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/79669617/print-fairy-september-sapphire-flower


A Painting for Halloween

I don't normally paint for Halloween. It's been years since I even had the desire to. Now...that's not saying I don't like Halloween, but my work tends to be something that could be used year round. I like that. But I do so love a good mask, so I thought I'd paint one. :)

Here's the work in progress. She's pretty small; a 4x6 painting. Something quick but elegant. I have always wanted to throw a Masquerade Ball, hopefully someday I will. But until then, I must live through my paintings.

I hope to have her finished by the end of the week. If not, I'll go crazy! Not quite sure what to call her yet...

Have you ever been to a Masquerade Ball? If so, was it as much fun as they look? I want to know!

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For this week's Illustration Friday topic, I decided to play with watercolors and created this little painting of one of my favorite flowers - poppies (which I think are a perennial flower, but I could be wrong).
This painting is cobbled together from several photos I'd taken when we lived in Los Angeles. This type of poppy (Alpine poppy?) was a popular garden flower in California. I remember seeing sizeable beds of them at my husband's office and we had some smaller collections of them at our little apartment complex. I always looked forward to their blooming every spring!

This painting is for sale - here - at my Etsy shop.

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Headed down to Santa Cruz for the weekend last week and did some morning sketching. I'll be posting these for the next couple days as I get them scanned in.

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This little character popped into my head the other day, so I made a rough painting of her over the course of a few morning sessions:
I don't know why her hat is so tall or how exactly it stands up as well as it does. Maybe she stores something under it - perhaps flower seeds or some such, although that seems highly impractical. I probably won't get to it for a while, but I do eventually want to do a full-scale painting of her in her garden:
I'm not sure what to do with the background yet. Maybe some dynamic clouds or possibly some tall silhouetted pine-y trees to give contrast between a dark background and the sunlit, brightly colored garden. I'll have to give it some more thought....

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After some back and forth, I finally dececided on the illustration I wanted to use as my new promo postcard. I finished this piece in the wee hours of Monday morning. I was kind of surprised I sat here Sunday night and worked on this. I rarely paint on Sunday […]

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Left this on my kitchen windowsill until it started to sprout.  I loved the curves that formed as the stalks reached toward the sun.

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Drawing inspiration from photos I took a year ago of wildflowers in Austin (see previous post Mexican Hats & Indian Blankets), I drew this little guy who is modeling his Mexican hat and Indian blanket poncho. I love how the common names of so many wildflowers evoke such very specific images:
I mostly just wanted to get the idea down on paper, but I also thought these simple drawings would provide me a good opportunity to play with digital coloring since I am still just barely dipping my toes in the great big digital pond. Something else I did with these drawings that I almost never do was to complete the initial shading in pencil. In my current technique, the painting stage consumes so much time that I never bother to establish lighting in the sketch phase. I'll often work it out in a color study if I can't visualize it well enough to go straight to final. If you notice a difference in texture between the two drawings it's because one I drew on graphics pad paper and the other on bristol paper just to get a feel for how the different media take shaded pencil drawings.

I think this little character is begging for a story. Maybe I'll dream something up for him some day...

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Hey everyone! Here is a work in progress piece I’m working on right now for a Sleeping Beauties series I created. I started this one a little differently. This time I drew the basic shapes in Illustrator. Then brought the piece into Photoshop. Where I’m working with different brushes and adding textures using pattern overlays [...]

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