TamandaArt

 A quick glance at a few of the best paintings this year... Here's to next year... hoping that everything just gets better. Happy New Year!

These are a great examples of how different dog portraits can be  even when painted in a similar format. Take Henry here. He is a loveable, forgiving, wonderful dog that is always smiling and happy to see you. He has these amazing eyes and colour markings on his fur. I incorporated a complimentary colour as background and voila. Patches is a sweetheart who thinks all 105 pounds of her should make her a lap dog. Her sad expression always lets her get too many treats. I cast a blue shadow and used that as a background. With Selene I wanted a very formal portrait. The first reason being that she's the type of dog that has harsh bone structure and we can use the dramatic lighting to do this. The second reason is I really wanted to try this background effect. All were painted at the same time and in a similar format but are so different.  

Getting a little closer. Almost done. This is one of many 12" x 16" canvases that I am doing for next years calendar series.  

Here is a peek at something I have been working on. It didn't really start out all that pretty despite the beautiful reference of Creekview Floral Co. flowers. I wasn't sure what I was going to do in the background. I am kinda in love with this blue. At this point I will play around with the composition,  deepen the shadows underneath to try and balance it out. You can see my little squiggles here. Not exactly high tech, but I know what I mean. A bit like my handwriting, as long as I can read it, right? Lets see where this goes, shall we?  

I always like to show my work half finished.  Well, not always. Sometimes it is a real mess. Those I really don't want anyone to see and they really are hard to show you. This little panel isn't like them. You can see the the painting emerge. I will admit to...if you look at the top of the painting, you can see a darker smudge. Yep, that was me scrubbing off the first two initial drawings and flipping it over and trying again. It is more light green than yellow. "Winterberries" 8" x 10" oil on canvas board