First Painting of the year - Colorful Harbor

This is another exercise in painting loose and with limited amount of detail. The focus in this painting is in the horizontal band created by the boats and awnings. I tried to keep the buildings loose and let the watercolors do their thing, after painting I added some pencil and white conte crayon line work.

Italian Mountain Village

It has been almost a year since I have posted anything, being a father of triplets does not bode well for free time to paint or fish. But with a week off from work and having some help from my sister who is visiting I decided to bring out the watercolors and through down some paint.

For inspiration i like to look at John Lovett's blog Splashing Paint, he is a great artist and sometimes has tutorials on his blog. The painting above was a tutorial on how to suggest detail something i struggle with I have a tendency to try to paint all the detail. The painting is not nearly as good as Lovett's but not bad considering how little painting i have been doing lately.

Italian Streetscapes

Here are a couple of paintings I did with my new "graham" watercolors, for my sister who has an affinity for Italian travel. I am too poor to go there myself but it looks nice in the photos.

Landscapes and Streetscapes are a new subject for me that I would like to improve upon. The Canal painting was done rather quickly and has a looser quality I like how the water and the building turned out, the bridge and the boats need some work.
I spent quite a bit more time on Italian Village painting, not to mention it was a complicated perspective tofigure out and draw (still not very acurate). Moving foreward with streetscapes I am going to focus on minimal detail and focus on tones and shapes and let the watercolors do their thing, this seems to be a common theme in the watercolor artist I admire.

Places I like - Oregon

I decided to bring out the water colors and experiment with some quick landscapes, in between feeding babies.
here are a few of the places that are close to my heart here in oregon

Haystack Rock Cannon Beach

Mt Jefferson From Pacific Crest Trail

Columbia River Gorge Goat farm

The Smartest Animals in the world

While I have been on FMLA I have been staying busy feeding and changing diapers on the triplets. But also have managed to watch a number of documentaries; documentaries about animals. Two stand out in my mind one about Crows and one about elephants. The one about crows confirmed what I already knew- Crows are the smartest animal in the world (along with elephants and chimps), this made me happy since I am a huge crow proponent, and feel that they are misunderstood. Two interesting facts are that crows can recognize people faces and associate them with events, they can also make tools to solve simple problems, this already makes them smarter than a lot of people.
I also learned some new things about elephants: they are smart too, maybe not as smart as crows but they can pass knowledge down from generation to generation which is cool.

Here are two paintings that celebrate the brains of the animal world....thank you crows and elephants you make the world a much brighter place.


"Wise old Elephant"

Trout Illustrated going International

My pectorial paintings caught the fancy of Italian Blog author "Captain Rusty Hook" (Mattia),

check out the great piece he did on my art even if you don't read Italian.

Next week Paris.

Thanks Mattia!

His blog also has some sweet home made lures, music of the day, photography and other cool stuff check it out:

http://capitanrustyhook.blogspot.com/search/label/Fishing%20Art

"Back to School"

This is my latest painting "Back to School" inspired by the wonderful fall weather and that smell of learning in the air (i am not going back to school but many kids are). I imagine these 3 jouvenile trout are on there way to school to learn about the dangers of fishermen, ospreys, beavers and other adversaries of creek life, but from the look of it they are just going to goof around all day. I think this painting has more of a childrens book illustration style to it so that it appeals to people of all ages regardless if they like fishing or not.

I actually did this painting for my Friend Don for fund raising auction he is helping out with. Hopefully someone with a kind heart will buy this painting to help out "Quiet Waters" a non profit organization design to help people with developmental disabilities.

http://www.quietwatersoutreach.org/