Thinking of summer already

Beach Buds

18" x 18" x1.5"

Oil with a palette knife on cradled artist board
SOLD

This painting was inspired by a photo I saw on a friend's Facebook wall. I hadn't painted any family photos in awhile and I thought this one was just too much fun to pass up. It's bigger than my usual size but I left the white border around the edges so I go back in later to paint in the date.

Sarah-if you are reading this, do you know what year this would have been? And thanks for letting me paint this cute picture.

My uncle sent me some great old family beach photos too. I think I feel a series coming on. And hopefully it will get me through the winter.

Drawing on the beach

It took all week to finally be able to do some pencil sketching on the beach. This is a drawing I did on the very last day at the beach. This captures our friends in their daily beach position-relaxed, reclined, and reading. Ahhh, summertime in New England. There is nothing better.

Buried in sand or cement?

Yesterday I worked on a painting that I started in class Thursday night. My cousin Amy had sent me this cute picture of her kids when they were in Florida and I thought it might be a good palette knife challenge. Amy-if you are checking the blog today, thanks for the reference photo! From left to right, that's Danny, Teddy, Jack, and Betsy.

I took some photos along the way of the progress. Here is where I was after class on Thursday.

I started with the faces because that is usually the most challenging part and yesterday I felt they needed a little refinement. Here they are after a little more work.

And here are a few close up shots of the faces.


Then I started in on the shoes, the shovels, and finally the sand. I wanted to make sure the sand color was different enough from the skin tones but still read as sand, When I stepped away for awhile, I wondered if the color I used made it look like they were buried in cement instead of sand. What do you think?