'As idle as a painted ship upon a painted sea'

I was asked by a co-worker to do a painting for her. I'm cool with birds and doing a pretty good job with apples. But she wanted something that reminded her and her husband of their honeymoon to Saint Lucas. Something with boats and the ocean.

This is what I came up with. To date, this has been the most challenging painting I've done. I knew immediately how I wanted to do it, but the colors and the mountain gave me fits. Also, I wrestled with where to draw the line at how complicated I wanted to make the painting. I tried adding reflections of the boats and was really unhappy with how those turned out, so I repainted the water for a third time.

In the end, I'm really happy that I kept it more simple, giving very little detail to the boats, mountain and sky.

My coworker says she loves it, so I'm calling it a success.

Next up is a flower painting for another co-worker.

The Book on Birds

Kimberly and I spent part of our long Fourth of July weekend returning to a project we'd kicked around a bit a month or so ago. We still had this stack of old Reader's Digest covers that we'd planned to use for bird-related art. So we spent a few hours cutting stencils and painting birds. I must say, having Kimberly's input proved valuable. Many of her suggestions improved the look of the book covers and will also make future book-bird artwork easier.

We made 13 of them. Seeing them spread across our dinner table made for a delightful scene. They all looked so nice. Then we asked ourselves, "Wouldn't these look even better framed?" We set out to find some frames that would have a look appropriate for these pieces of art. It needed to be rustic, whimsical, natural, shabby chic and inexpensive.

We found nothing in a store that matched these prerequisites. So we made the frames. We had a bunch of perfectly aged wood leftover from a fence we had in the backyard. I did the miter cuts and we pieced them together to create frames that were just right for the book birds.

Sorry for the long delay between posts. Been busy working on a boat painting.

This painting has sold.