Today I got to the studio all worked up to finish the second steam painting….but I had, as I always do when I leave, turned it to face the door so that the next time I walked in it would be the first thing I saw (fresh eyes!), and, lo, it was done.  The painting elves had clearly been hard at work because I couldn’t see the problems I meant to fix at all.  Steam II: Elbow River is now reposing in the corner waiting to see if said problems resurface.

A few days ago I found a challenge on dailypaintworks I thought I might try.  The exercise was to take an object and make a series of 10-minute paintings of it on the same canvas.  I had an apple and a blue cloth so  I was in business.  After ten minutes, though, I’d barely got started, so I dropped the time limit and just went for it.  Each side took me somewhere around 45 minutes.   Fun.

Here’s what it looked like after the first half was done.  The blue lines are just what I drew with a Sharpie to divide the canvas.

And I got to take the pictures with my phone!  Will I do my final portfolio documentation with it?  No.  But for keeping up with the blog, this is soooo good.  ADDENDUM:  I must have been tired when I published this last night.  Revised opinion:  the phone camera will be wonderful when I figure out why these look perfect on my photo-editing software, but not so great here.  Will replace with  nice clear images when I get it sorted.  I suspect  I will be hiking up and down the five flights of stairs to take my photos outside.  Sigh.