Insect Challenge

Little Green Moth

6x6"

$72

DPW $50

     This week's Challenge: paint an insect. Insects are everywhere when you don't want them. And if I found one, could I look at it long enough to paint it without creeping out. And then there this one was, a little green moth on my kitchen window screen. Really quite pretty.

     There were many more details in his design, but I had to leave them out. When I tried to paint them, they looked "painted on." Nature can be that way. If you paint what you see, it is just unbelievable.

California Gray Squirrel

Squirrel

8x10"

$160

DPW $112

     I saw a picture yesterday that was done in orange and green, that's all. I liked it, so when I began this painting, I gave myself the assignment of making it in that color scheme. Although the real squirrel is gray and the leaves he was sitting on are beige, he is now an orange and green "gray squirrel." The green is my new best friend, Prussian Blue, mixed with a little hansa yellow and cad orange. His nose and eyes are Prussian Blue, too, made even darker with burnt sienna, another orange.

     

Dogwood

Dogwood

6x8"

Oil

$96

DPW $65

     This spring the dogwoods of so many varieties were wonderful in Nevada County. This flower is in a tree on our hillside. It was surrounded by many others, so I cropped it out and only suggested faintly the others in the picture. It is easy to render white flowers uncomfortably cool so I used burnt sienna and yellows in the greenery and shadows to warm it a little. Paying attention to the shadow of a flower, treating it as a sort of geometric shape is very interesting. It seems to make all the difference.