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See how easy that was? Aaaah. Much better.

In an effort to return the pretty to my blog, here. Here’s a pretty parrot. This is a Blue Fronted Amazon, and wow what a pose. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. (Since she’s so pretty, she’s a girl. Only in bird world, it’s probably a boy.) I met her at the zoo last weekend along with a few other beautiful feathered critters that I’ll share this week, as I finalize some projects and move into a very special, very big project. Yes, there will be polls involved. I love polls. More than two of you better show up, too. There may be prizes. Or not. I could just be saying that. Unless you like pickles.

heh.

Like every normal family, getting everyone together in one family pose is like pulling teeth. Moaning and groaning and heavy sighs ensue while I beg and plead since we haven’t had a family portrait in a few years. Well, several burst mode 10 second delay shots later, and we have our family portrait for the year.

I paid a totally different kind of sitting fee.

Thank you, self timer and faux suede curtain panel. Thank you Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 and thank you Corel Paint Shop Pro. Thank you Photoscape and Adobe Photoshop, and last but not least, Dell for letting me merge, crop, save and re-save without delay – or malfunction.

I recently launched a design for Solaris Studios, run by Aric Hoek, an incredible and unique photographer in the Houston area. His site is fully run on one single installation of WordPress, of course, and I provided him a lot of custom code to make the various pages and categories of his site function in specific ways. He utilizes pages for primary content, posts for his blog content and specific categories combined with the YAPB plugin to run the photoblog section.

He’s really maximized the various uses all in one installation – which I’ll be doing here on my own site over the next couple/few weeks.

This sweet White-breasted Nuthatch is one of my favorite backyard birds. Whenever I watch them, I feel an immediate sense of calm and peace. They’re very serene, deliberate and curious creatures. Their little squawk is easy to identify, too.Do you have a favorite critter in your backyard? I’m curious – and would love to have a peek at the different kinds of animals found in different areas of the world.

This weekend brought me a couple of unique photo ops, for sure. I wanted to try my hand at photographing goldfish, since I was “goldfish sitting”, and the goldfish I sat on (heh!) was actually gold. He’s a squirmy little sucker, and it took a while to figure out exposure settings. While I was scanning through the photos I managed to get that weren’t an orange blur, this one stuck out.

I asked Chickeymonkey this morning how many fish are in the photo. She said “one” – and upon prodding, finally counted three. Did you see them all when you first looked?

We spent our Labor Day at the zoo. It was SO hot, and the critters were really lazing around. The Giraffe’s seemed to be in their element, though, these three struck a pose for me that I couldn’t resist. The tallest did the splits and grabbed up a nice big chunk of grass, and the other two saw an opportunity for a free meal they didn’t have to work for so they stuck their necks out to eat off of the grasses that were trailing down into their reach.

It was a three day weekend, for sure.

How was yours?

Caesar’s portrait is complete, pending client proofing. You may notice I’ve changed the collar from blue to red – a last minute tweaking that makes him even a little more bold against the canvas.

Enjoy!

Here’s Caesar’s underpainting. If you’re curious, I don’t use any black in my paintings at all. I haven’t in quite some time. Since there is no “black” in nature, my black consists of various combinations of indigo with raw umber, sap green and/or magenta. I think this produces a much more natural portrait with true earth tones.

You can see that my reference photos aren’t really “perfect”, but I wanted you to see that sometimes, if it’s all you have, it can still work. A few photos that show me personality, coat length and color and a bit of eye color, and I can usually fill in the rest. I know how important it is that the end result replace those photos with a clear, lifelike memory of a pet.

That said, I’ve got Caesar speed drying and I’m going to try to finish his portrait tomorrow afternoon.