I was excited to find out today that I have had two pieces of art accepted in a juried show to be held by the Chelmsford Center for the Arts in early April. This is the first time any of my work has been juried into a show. Admittedly this show is quite small, but it's thrilling nevertheless. The accepted pieces are the "Feather light, feather bright" and "White Peonie" which both appear earlier on this blog.

This is from a photo of Hay Bales in a Tennessee field taken by Paula Ford and was part of a challenge on Wet Canvas.com. The challenge being to start with an underpainting prior to putting in details. I chose some pretty vivid colors for my underpainting and mostly they were completely covered by the work I did on top, except in the trees where I allowed some of the red to show through.

We've just had our kitchen remodeled and I painted this picture of pears to go on the wall, alongside the earlier one I did of grapes in a bowl. I have just got a new camera and am still finding my way around all the various controls. I may also enter this in a juried show that is coming up soon in our town.

I painted the picture on the left about a month ago but have only just got round to taking a photograph as I had to cut it to size and mount it for framing. This is not easy when you paint in pastel because there is always the risk of smudging the finished work. It is from a photograph taken by someone on Wet Canvas and I call it Distant Sierras. It's 16 x 20.

This right hand picture is just a little one, 5" x 7" using up a scrap of sanded paper that I had lying around. I don't remember where I got the photograph.

I wanted to try something different and I came across this picture which seemed like it would be a challenge ........ and I was right. I think I'm going to enter it into a juried competition here in Chelmsford, though I don't have any great hopes of it being accepted. Watch this space!

More Mist

OK - so I seem to be in the mood to paint pictures of mist at the moment. This is an early morning view over a misty lake in the Adirondak mountains of New York. It is offered on the Spotlight thread of Wet Canvas this month as an exercise in cropping a photo to the satisfaction of the artist. However, rather than doing anything fancy, I chose to go with the landscape format because I wanted the maximum amount of mist in the frame. Photo by Don Ketchek.

Into the Mist - (again)

This is my second attempt at this picture. John has taken the original one to work and has it sitting on his credenza. He's thrilled with it. This time I painted it 16" x 20" and made it a little bit mistier that the first one. It's from a photo taken by someone with the Username Katfre in the reference image library on Wet Canvas.

This is the latest thing I have been working on. It's really small. I have never done anything this size before (about 5 x 7) but I wanted to give it a go. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, though there are certainly challenges.

This is from a photograph I got from the reference image library on the Wet Canvas web site. I call it "Into the Mist" and I think it's my favorite painting to date. It was a challenge trying to figure out how to give the appearance of mist, but I think it came out reasonably well. I like this one so much that I think I'll do it in a larger format, this one is 11 x 14 and I think I'd like to do it 16 x 20. John loves this and wants to take it to hang in his office.

I haven't been here for a while because although I've been at my easel I didn't have access to a camera due to the fact that my husband was in England visiting his mother and he took the camera with him. However, he is now back and I have been able to photograph my recent work.

There is going to be a Cupcake Fest in Chelmsford in February and the local art society members have been asked if they would like to paint pictures of cupcakes to be displayed in conjunction with the event. I thought this would be a fun thing to do - which is was - so this is my contribution. Unfortunately, I had already framed the picture when I photographed it, resulting in a shiny spot right in the middle, it's a bit difficult to see, but you get the idea.