Still life in Progress..

I have been working on this still life for the last week, took a class for school and helped my daughter move so I have not had a lot of time to finish it up. My sister is requesting that I do a series of fruit and such so she can hang them in her kitchen.

Something white and something blue

This is for my daughter's birthday, she loves white tulips and wanted something blue. I used a lot of what I learned at Dianna Ponting's workshop on the it, especially the vase. In real life the background has a little more blue in it.
ps. I do not think she will see this on the computer, they are moving and her computer is packed up, so if anyone sees her, mums the word..

Dianna Ponting Workshop

We just returned from a wonderful pastel workshop with the Canadian artist, Dianna Ponting. the workshop was in San Clemente, Ca (so we got to spend some time on the beach too) What a great experience it was for me. It was fun to get together with other pastelists from Wet Canvas and meet them face to face. Her methods of teaching really appealed to me and I will be using them in the near future (already have my next painting ready to go)

Plein Air Water Lillie- sort of

A couple of us got together to paint at the local garden center here in town. I am not much of a plein air (painting outside) so I went a couple of days early and had Stan take some photos, this is one of the lillies that was blooming that day.
It was a fun painting session, some people stopped by to watch and it was decided that we will paint there once a month. They have probably 20,000 things give or take a few that one can paint including some beautiful ponds. I actually finshed this at home later that day with my online painting buddies (see virtual online painting in my links). So I did two paintouts in one day.

July Pastel Challenge

I painted this horse from the WetCanvas July pastel project. Everyone is given the same reference to paint. This is only the second horse I have painted and I am pretty happy with the outcome. The horse is on velour paper (very soft and one cannot erase a mistake so sometimes can be hard to work on)
We just got a new camera so I think we may be driving around town to get some more referenc photos.

Afternoon in the park

I decided to put the lions on hold for a while. Better to let the painting work itself out in my head for a while.

Meanwhile, I painted this cute little black dog who belongs to a friend of mine on Wet Canvas. This was fun to paint even though the dog is black. I must have done something wrong when I scanned the dog because the background looks a little odd. It is smoothed out in real life and more blended.