Pigs in Shit

Happy pigs from Norah and Chris' farm.  Pigs are great to photograph and paint--they are real hams for the camera (or maybe they're just really curious about the shiny metal snout-shaped thing) and then have tons of expression and character in their faces and body language.

Watercolor, 10 x 14

Chickens

I visited my friends' Norah and Chris' new farm a few weeks ago.  (Or maybe its been longer by now, I'm losing track of time!)  This is a portrait of a couple of their chickens.  The chickens had an awesome pasture that was quite big and had nice layers of plants and grass for tasty bugs and things to live in.  The chickens were so bold and red against the bright green leaves and grass, so I had to try to capture it, though the glow of the green and red was tricky to really capture.
Their farm was awesome!  There might be some pig paintings coming too...

A Goofy Goat

I've been painting more than I've been posting here, I swear!  This one is actually from almost two weeks ago.  And there's been at least one more in progress and one gift painting since my last post.  But admittedly, I went for a little while without painting, primarily because I was home in Craftsbury for three whole weeks.  When I'm home, there's always something that seems more pressing than painting--like helping to keep the gardens under control and the peas and zucchinis at a reasonable size.  But now I'm back at the OTC, so I should have time to paint more, assuming I can stop watching the olympics for a few minutes.
This goofy little goat really did have this silly little sideways smile, and it was also almost this skinny...though I think I inadvertently may have made its neck a bit too long. It was fun to paint though, and I'm really happy with how the grass came out.  Grass is one of the hardest things to paint, in my opinion.

Watercolor, 16 x 11

A Painting Progression

Goats and Greens

Veggie fields at Pete's Greens.  Oil on hardboard.

For the past week here in Lake Placid, I've been concurrently working on two paintings: an oil painting, and a watercolor.  This works well because oil paint dries slowly and often I need to give the painting a day or two to dry before I can continue working on it without the lights and darks getting all muddled together.  I suppose I could have done two oil paintings at once, but its fun to switch back and forth--both mediums have their pros and cons.
Both of these paintings presented challenges to me--I had to re-do the rows of seedlings quite a few times before I was satisfied.  But the baby goats were especially hard.  Its hard enough to capture the essence of one creature--let alone a whole bunch at once.  I'm still not happy with them!  I think I should start doing more animal paintings--they're a good challenge.

Baby Goats.  There's no way they would have been in a row
like this without a fence.  Maybe I should have painted the
fence too?  

Kowhai and Frederick

This painting isn't for sale, but I wanted to post something so that my multitudes of blog readers (hehe) would know that I am still in fact painting.  I visited Nils at his family's farm in Maine, and had lots of fun helping out (playing) with the goats.  I helped pull this particular baby goat into the world.  We named him Frederick.  Sadly his mother, Kowhai, died from complications with a second baby.  So I made this painting in memory of her.  She was a very nice goat.
I painted it during my first biathlon-training stint in Lake Placid. Painting things like this is a great way for me to stay sane while living at the olympic training center there.  I'm going to be spending quite a bit more time there this summer, so that should ensure more paintings!  And I took lots of baby goat pictures, so there will probably be some more baby goat paintings too!

Spring greens!

Despite being not in Vermont, as soon as the ski season was over I was getting a hankering to paint some springtime-in-VT colors. So I dug up some of the photos I took last spring when the grass and trees were so bright green that whenever I tried to paint them they just looked fake. I decided that I wanted to do a little bit of experimenting with brighter colors and less careful copying of reality. And it was fun! The inspiration for these two paintings came from my favorite VT artists--Woody Jackson (top one) and Sabra Field (bottom). Now I'm excited to get home and do some paintings of this spring!

Both are watercolor, 9 x 12.