Drastic Measures had to be taken

New Beginnings and New Beginnings II

You may remember this picture of two of my paintings at the Birmingham Art Association juried show from this post and I told you here of some of the struggles I had with New Beginnings. However, I don't think I ever shared with you the kinda scary measures I had to take to complete New Beginnings II.  

I was having a REALLY hard time getting the shape of the egg right. It was turned at a sort of awkward angle and I just couldn't quite get the curve. One of the things I love about painting is that pretty much everything is fixable. Just paint over it! This time, though, more extreme measures had to be taken. I felt the need for a clean start in that area (a "new beginning," Ha!). So, I sanded it down. Yep! It was a little scary. Look below-

Sorry for the kinda awful photos. My husband had the good camera with him. Do you see the really shiny halo around the egg? That's where I sanded it back down to the bare aluminum. Then I turned both the painting and my reference photo upside down (a good little trick to turn off that voice in your head that says, "An egg looks like this,").

                                                 

I've written a lot about letting your paintings go through their ugly stage and not giving up on them prematurely (see this post and this post, for example). In this case, it just took a little more extreme parental involvement!

Brain Child Wins a Prize!

New Beginnings at the Birmingham Art Association juried show

Guess what! My painting, New Beginnings won Best in Show at the Birmingham Art Association's annual juried show. I was very excited just to be involved the show. I felt that the work this year was especially beautiful, so I'm all the more honored by the award.

Mary Liz Ingram and Dariana Dervis with Dariana's lovely
 mixed-media collages (and second place ribbon).

My dear friends (and fellow members of the art group, Eclectic Art Social Club) Mary Liz Ingram and Dariana Dervis also each received second place ribbons in (respectively) "drawing/printmaking" and "mixed-media" for their work in the show! Way to represent!!

Dariana Dervis, Mary Liz Ingram, and Chi Roach with
Mary Liz's beautiful pastel
 (her second place ribbon is behind Chi's head :)

A pretty awful picture of me,
but pretty good of my paintings.

You may remember New Beginnings (and my struggles completing it) from this post. Just goes to show, the brain child is worth the labor pains. So proud :).

New Beginnings

 Hi all! I was excited to see some of you at the show the other night at Parkside. It was a really fun night- good turnout, relaxing evening. All in all I'd call it a success!

A couple of posts ago I showed you an area of a painting that I had to just leave alone for a while. However, I never did show you the finished painting! Here it is!

New Beginnings I

And here is a companion piece:

New Beginnings II

These are actually kind of big paintings for me. I typically work rather small (around 10"x10" size). These are both 20"x24" inches. I really enjoyed doing some bigger work, however, and I think I'm going to continue experimenting with size and scale.