"Le Petit Artiste" 11" x 14", oil on canvasWell, I've been trying to post for the last few days, but Blogger hasn't been letting me upload any pictures. Either Blogger or my crappy internet connection, who knows.
This one's went pretty fast. It was fun, too. It's a picture of my son, taking up the whole kitchen floor, sitting in a beam of sunlight while he colors. The scene took my breath away, and I knew I had to paint it, so I snapped a few quick photos, some of which turned out really well. There's another one from the series I might paint, too. But this is it for now.
Aren't children precious? Everything they do is precious, even the not so precious stuff. And today, that really hit home for me. I mean, I've always known it, and always thought it, but sometimes we take it for granted a bit.
That all stopped today. My daughter almost died.
For weeks, I've been telling her "Take that out of your mouth! You could choke!" Instead of just getting rid of the offending marbles, or picking them up, we'd get distracted by something else. She'd take it out of her mouth, and we wouldn't give it another thought. STUPID!@!!@#$% She's two. She doesn't listen or she just doesn't remember.
Today, she choked. She was gasping, and barely making a sound. Her face was starting to turn purple and she was clawing at her neck. I rushed over and stuck my finger down her throat, but it was a marble, and the slippery little thing just pushed farther down. I freaked! My husband rushed over and tried to get it out, but to no avail. He finally grabbed her and did the Heimlich maneuver. After only one or two tries, the marble flew out and landed on the floor in front of me. I broke down. I couldn't stop shaking. I just cried and cried. It was too close.
We went through the whole house after that, throwing out anything smaller than a baseball...well not quite a baseball, but you know...
I'll never take my children's safety for granted again. Nothing matters more than them. Her throat is sore, and she's shaken up, but she's alive.
"Brotherly Love" 20"x24" oil on canvas NFS
"My Little Artist" 18 x 24 oil on canvas
"It Wasn't Me!"
Searching for Sand Dollars 
"Le Petit Artiste" 11" x 14", oil on canvas
Okay, this isn't really only the third painting session, but I didn't dare show you all the previous two or three before this! Frightening! For literally 15 painting hours, I went backwards. Once again, I seemed to forget everything I learned. I'm starting to question the whole inspiration thing. Every successfull artist I've ever read about says you have to work even if you don't "feel like it", but it seems like every time I try that, I screw everything up! The skin tone has gone from yellow, to orange to purple and back again! But, yesterday, I "felt like" painting, and everything I knew came flooding back to me. It was like I was working from instinct instead of thinking about it. Anyways, I'm pretty happy with the results. I still need to tweak some values and richen up the skin tone a tad, but I'm feeling positive about it again.
This is after my first day of working on laying in the main colors. I quickly blocked in the background and started adding detail to the part of the blanket that's wrapped around the baby. I changed the position of the face, and added detail there. I quickly blocked in shadow colors on the arms and legs. I'm having a few problems with the skin tones and the temperature changes. I think that I may need to make the local skin tone warmer, with the shadows warm, as the light is fairly cool. Right now she looks kind of corpse-like...YUK. The colors in the reference photo aren't very good, and I wanted to warm the whole thing up a bit, so I am kind of guessing at the colors at this point...tricky...anyways, I'll have more soon.
