Good News Day!

I just got my acceptance letter from the 25th Annual All Colorado Art Show at the Curtis Arts & Humanities in Greenwood Village, CO. It's a wonderful venue and the juror is a curator from the Denver Art Museum. So I was sooooo pleased to be accepted. The exhibit runs from June 14-August 1, 2008.

http://www.greenwoodvillage.com/index.asp?NID=148

What's Buggin' Me?

While I'm trying to figure out how to work myself out of the "Yellow Pepper Top" problem, I thought I would post the first of my "bug" series.

This is done with acrylics on a 3" square canvas and sprayed with Kamar Varnish to give it a nice sheen. It is meant to be displayed on the little mini easels available at Dick Blick.

New Work in Progress- Yellow Pepper Top

I've not done alot of artwork the last week or so. I'm getting ready to have my "appliances", in other words "braces" put on tomorrow. So it's been to the dentist for cleaning, perio charts, flouride, x-rays, to the orthodontist for fiberglass molds and separators. I had the separators put in last Friday......on Saturday and Sunday I was questioning the wisdom of having this whole thing done. My mouth felt like someone had jammed hot forks in my back teeth. But finally yesterday I realized I might possibly live through this. ;-)

This piece will be another experiment with using markers as an underpainting for colored pencil.

The first experiment I tried was with Staedtler markers, but I saw these in the Dick Blick catalog....they are archival and lightfast. They are also super fast-drying compared to the Staedtler's which took about 24 hours to dry. The Prismacolor markers take about an hour to fully dry.

My only disappointment is that there is no yellow marker??? They come in a fine point or chisel point. I ordered the chisel point and was able to apply them easily to the white Ampersand Pastelbord that I am using (5" x 7").

New Markers..........




Here is the underpainting complete, using purple for the background. I was very happy the markers don't leave any stroke marks, but I was taken aback at how brilliant the colors are. I'm hoping that I can get enough coverage with the colored pencils (I will be using my Coloursoft's by Derwent).



Underpainting finished..........

I was pretty pleased that the purple of the background toned down nicely with an application of Dark Green, Deep Red, Indigo and Black. The only thing that I noticed was a bit of flaking with the first layer. The cp's tended to flick off some of the marker color. Easily fixable, but a little annoying.

Background finished.....now on to the pepper!

Trio

This is also from the archives. I don't often do figurative work, but this was a gift for my son's mother-in-law. This was a group of singers that performed at her retirement party.

Trio was my first attempt at combining colored pencils and pastel pencils back in 2004.
Trio 8 x 10 colored and pastel pencils on Colorfix Gift

Glory in the Garden

I have been lax in my posting!! We had our granddaughter last week and there was no hope for doing any artwork. This week I'm trying to get caught up on my Membership Director responsibilities for CPSA.

My other big news is that tomorrow I start the process for getting braces. I'm going to be 60 this year and instead of 60 being the new 40.....I've decided for me 60 is the new 13!

I just sold this piece which was a nice suprise. I created it in 2004 when I was working in a bold circular stroke, sometimes called circulism (the term and technique generated from colored pencil artist Maggie Toole.)

Glory in the Garden 10 x 10.5" colored pencil on black paper Sold