St. Augustine water oils

Today was experiment day. I've been loving my acrylics, but have heard a lot about the newer water-based oil paints as well. I was curious about them, and when I was at Michael's yesterday they had a small introductory set for 40% the regular $24.99, so I decided to splurge! Only six paint tubes and not necessarily the colors I would have chosen. If you are going to provide only six paints do you really need both a yellow and a yellow ocher!

I would have chosen a slightly warmer blue and green as well, and maybe a Payne's gray rather than the yellow ocher. Of course I could have bought the colors individually to get exactly what I wanted, but that would have cost about $40 rather than $14. :-)

And this is just an experiment. I tried them today and created the above, 8x10 on canvas. Definitely just a quickie and tomorrow I may make changes, but an interesting experiment.

Leftover Beach

Last night I spent the evening painting a violin top for an Art Guild project. I finally got as far as I could go but still had some wet paints on my palette. I also had a small 8x10 canvas with me, so I got it out to just paint on it to use up some paint.

So the painting above is what I wound up with. Just a quick 20-minute effort using what I had on my palette. Not anything special, but I love beachy scenes.

Great Horned Owls

Thanks again to my friend Leslie for inviting me to her studio, forcing me to try to paint! This is the image from last night, another 8x10 acrylic. I started these owls two weeks ago on an 11x14, and they were so awful I just painted over them and did the painting just before this one instead.

The reference is from a photo I look at Fort Mose in 2015. I had heard through the birding grapevine that a pair of great horned owls had been spotted there. When I got to the park I could hear them hooting, but while I looked high and low I could not see them anywhere. What I did see was a man with binoculars and a camera with a giant foot-long lens hunting around also.

He was looking for the owls too! Since everyone spots birds better than I do I asked if I could tag along. Sure enough, he was the one who finally spotted the owls. :)

My lucky day I guess as he said he'd been coming every day for over a month looking for the owls, and this was the first day he'd seen them. I've been wanting to paint them ever since but only now got around to it.

Beach Morning

Wednesday I went to my friend Leslie's studio again, which is always fun, and makes me get out and do some sort of artwork even if I'm not feeling overly inspired. I started on a different painting which I hated more and more as I went on, so I finally took the colors on my palette and just wiped them back and forth all over the canvas. As I did it seemed a scene began to appear so I just pushed to emphasize it a little further. And that's how I wound up with this painting - not great art but something that felt very theraputic to work on. Acrylic, and slightly larger than I have been working lately, at 11x14.