Me and my family at the opening reception. Friends at the opening reception. I wrapped up the Woods Waves and Ways show recently and I have been enjoying the afterglow ever since. What a wonderful experience!   A great big thank you to all of my family and friends who came out to support me. I feel very loved and grateful to you all.   Thank you to Rob Randle of Timeless Picture Framing and Gallery for inviting me to put the show together and for framing many of the pieces on display so beautifully.   To everyone who stopped in to see the show, chatted with me or [...]

Current work, flipped on its head. Flip your painting upside down to see what's really there   Sometimes you need to turn off your brain to paint. For example, this piece is about a pair of beautiful white pines along the Skyline Trail in the Ludington State Park. I love the weird and wonderful shapes of them. They're very lopsided and asymmetrical. To me, that's what makes them fascinating to paint.   You'd think it would be easy to get a likeness considering how much I like them, but it's not so! My brain overrides what's in my reference photo and I end up with tree [...]

I was taking a belly dancing class back when I was living in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a lot of fun and I was very taken with how many different kinds of people were in the class. It reminded me of how much I loved drawing figures back when I'd been in college. I asked the instructor if I could draw her students and she was very enthusiastic about the idea. So I began bringing in charcoal and newsprint to sketch with, arriving before class or staying after to draw. Soon, I wanted to add color to my drawings and decided that pastel [...]

Believe it or not, I started out by drawing belly dancers. I had set myself a goal of 100 belly dancers and by around number 50, the paintings were starting to feel a little stale. A friend suggested that I try drawing some of them in the style of a famous artist, like Salvador Dali. I did some research (thank you, Google images!) and voila! skelly dancers were born.  At first, I did five separate paintings of dancing skeletons on the beach. After that, feeling charged up, I finished my original series of 100 belly dancers. But the skellies weren’t through with [...]

Care of your pastel painting Taken from original post by Laura Shelley, Wet Canvas forum   Your new pastel is a hand-painted work of fine art. I used the best archival materials for its creation. If properly taken care of, your painting will last for many lifetimes. Pastel is one of the most permanent art mediums in existence. Many pastels painted over 200 years ago are still as bright and fresh as the day they were created.    The artist's pigments in my pastels are the same as those used in fine oil paints. The only difference is that with pastel the pigments are not mixed [...]