
Wolf in the Wood, Acrylic on wood panel, 2012 | This a wolf that resides at the Lakota Wolf Preserve in New Jersey. I photographed him several years ago.

Wolf in the Wood, Acrylic on wood panel, 2012 | This a wolf that resides at the Lakota Wolf Preserve in New Jersey. I photographed him several years ago.

Paper Wolf, Acrylic on paper, 2012 | This is a wolf who lives at the Lakota Wolf Preserve. I photographed him several years ago. This is an experimental painting using paper instead of canvas.

Joey, Acrylic and pastel on paper, 2012 | Joey is a blind, husky mix who is a permanent guest of MaPaw Siberian Husky Rescue.

Junie, Acrylic on paper, 2012 | My sweet girl Junie, resting on the porch.
I completely forgot how fun pastels are to work with! My daughter asked me to teach her to draw with pastels, so I dug out my old supply from (how long ago was it it) many.many years ago when I was in art school. It took a few minutes but I quickly remembered how much I loved drawing with them! Here are the fruits of my “labors.”
As I said before, I have trouble with portraits. Usually, I can do kids pretty well, as long as I am working with watercolors, but today, I pulled out the acrylics at gave painting a portrait of my daughter a shot. My plan was to try something sort of abstract or expressionistic, but somehow this image wanted to be relatively realistic. It’s not quite as soft as I wanted it, but then again, she is getting bigger and isn’t all chubby and baby-faced any more.
Especially those portraits that are not exactly realistic! An artist friend and I decided to do portraits of each other for a project. He drew me with conte crayon (I’ll post his creation sometime soon!) and I painted him with acrylics. If it isn’t really apparent yet, I paint dogs! Well, dogs, wolves, sometimes even birds when I’m feeling adventurous, but I rarely paint people. So, I already felt at a disadvantage. On top of that, this man is my friend, a really good friend, so I really don’t want to make a hash of it. I took a bunch of photos and fiddled with the lighting an composition until I was pretty happy with my plan and then I set to work. It took me a coupe of sessions in front of the easel to get to the final piece…and then I had to deliver it! Happily, he seems to like it! I was a bit worried, because what I captured on the canvas seemed a bit on the dark side. I had set out to do something kind of “pretty” and I had not done THAT at all!