Warm and cool lights

 This is Alex. She is one of my favorite models. She's not only latino and beautiful, but she's also just so good at holding a pose with style and grace. This pose was impressive because she held her eyes closed the whole time, sat perfectly still and didn't fall asleep. I can't even imagine how hard that would be. Plus. I love her nose. And I love how it turned out in this painting. And I love the brush strokes that are visible. The shadow parts are so thinnley painted that you can see the toned canvas underneath. Love it.

Collin was great...even though his hair was a headache to paint. My teacher, Justin Taylor, challenged me to paint only with vertical strokes. So hard! But I ended up really enjoying it. I'll definitely be experimenting a bit more with that idea. If you click on both of these you can see the brush strokes better. Which is personally my favorite part.

Thanksgiving Point evening light and Alpine Loop

 This painting is one that I did at the Thanksgiving Point Plein Air Festival. I was excited that one of my three sold, but I was kind of glad that this one didn't because it was my favorite, so I kind of wanted to keep it. But now my sister wants it, so I guess we'll see what ends up happening to it :)

 This one I painted up the Alpine Loop on an excursion with Richard Hull and Peter Sakievich. All three of us painted the same scene, but we each came up with such different paintings. I guess that's one reason I love painting so much—its so open to exploration and interpretation.

Amelia

So. My friend Mary has this adorable daughter and one morning we decided to paint her. At first I was sad that I could only stay for a little over an hour, but this ended up being the result. Nothing focuses the mind like lack of time and I quite like how it turned out. This painting is also special to me because I learned some things about painting that I had never understood before. Its too complicated to explain it all here, but ask me about it sometime and I'll tell you more. I also was reminded that I LOVE painting.

Teri, Renee, Alex

 

  

 

Again, going through some of my pieces getting ready to show some things at the festival and found these. The top one is of my roommate, Teri. She is so great and gets this paintings for being so.

plein air

These are two plein air (basically painting on location) paintings that I've done. The train one is fairly recent and steeple one was done a while ago, but I was going through my paintings, sorting out what I did and didn't want anymore and getting ready for a Plein Air Art Festival at Thanksgiving Point. The festival was a great experience and when I get my paintings back from that I'll post them up here. I started getting into plein air painting when I went to Italy a little over a year ago on a study abroad. My friend Jake Wyatt got me all excited about it and we did a bunch of paintings while we were there and have done a few together since we've been back—I think the bottom one was done on one of our painting adventures here in Provo. The train one was done when I was out painting with some good friends, Mary Summerhays and Sallie Poet.

Grand Canyon art trip

So I went on a trip with a grant-sponsored art group from BYU. It was amazing. Doing art was fun, but feeling the wind rushing through the Grand Canyon, hiking into the canyon to see the sun rise, throwing ourselves off the side of sand dunes and laughing with good friends is really what made this trip all that it was. Here are a couple of sketches that I did on the trip. The first is in marker and colored pencil (ironically, the exact colors that I needed were the only 5 colors that I had on my unprepared self), the second was in pastels borrowed from Jake and the third is just a photograph of the canyon. I'm working on another finished piece for a show going up. To be posted later :)

Head paintings...

 

Here's another 3 hour head study from my class... Our model wanted to wear a cowboy hat, I think to go along with his plaid, flannel shirt. :)

Adventure

 

For this one we had to illustrate a family saying. Growing up, every time that we would leave the house my mom would give us a hug and a kiss and say, 'Have a great adventure!' as we walked out the door. Thanks, Mom. Life has been a wonderful adventure so far. :)

Angel

This is a piece that I am still working on. I kind of like how it is coming along though.

Hello photoshop.

So. Photoshop. I've only ever really used it to fix photos (as the name implies) but I'm starting a digital painting class where we are learning to paint in photoshop and corel painter - I am so excited! Here's my very first one. A black and white sketch/painting that I did of one of Malcolm Liepke's pieces. I absolutely love his work and his texture. This piece's is nothing like his (which was done in oil) but I love the different types of texture that I got from using different brushes in photoshop. Yeah. I'm excited about this.

Southern California...

Okay - this piece was supposed to be inspired by a music video by Spike Jones about why someone would move to Southern California... interesting, I know -but the red-headed guy (Jacob Jones- an up and coming musician) is so cool looking! (and by that I mean not in my painting - but in real life :) )