"Shady Spot"

16 x 20

It's been a busy couple of weeks. The last post was days before the Chain of Parks Show in Tallahassee. Total sales were very good. Plus I got to meet a lot of really nice people and talked with a number of people who had purchased my paintings at various places. They all had nice things to say, and thats really neat. And the last blog post painting sold.

The week after that I was in Winter Park for the Winter Park Paint Out at the Polasek Museum. Sales were also good there and although I had some problems getting started, I ended up having a really good week. I got to meet a bunch of really good painters too.

This weekend I taught my first class. A group of painters here in Tallahassee meets once a month and they had asked me to demonstrate/teach. I have been thinking about doing this for a while. With all the kids stuff going on I never could find the time, but now with all the kids in college I decided to give it a try. And . . . I had a great time. The painting above is from the class. I decided to do a larger painting than I should have tried (just because of the time involved in covering a bigger canvas). But I think I was able to work it far enough to give some idea of how I do things. I spent about another hour and a half yesterday fixing things I needed to fix. For those who were there I will let you know what I did:

1. I refined the cows. Just added little things that definitely identify them as cows. Like the faces and the ears and a couple of profiles.

2. I added more definition to the leaves in the tree that are closer to the viewer and softened and cooled the edges of the leaves in the back.

3. I removed one branch that I thought didn't work with the anatomy of the tree. (Scraped it off and painted over with sky color.)

4. I added a cool green in the front of the cows to represent the shade.

5. I redid the cow in the front with the light hitting it to punch it up and capture the shape of the light. (all of the these changes were made either over top of thin paint or by scraping away paint and repainting).

I like it. I said before I started I wanted it to be about the hot ground in front and the cool under the tree, and I think I got close to what I wanted.

There are some really good painters in the group and I hope I didn't mess them up with my suggestions.

Thanks for looking.