Finally getting a chance to paint a bit today, here’s a shot of my progress on that lovely Great Blue Heron I’m working on.

View the whole work in progress

This is the new painting I was telling you about, the reference photo was taken by Laura @ Vitamin Sea and (of course I asked) she gave me permission to use her photograph to paint from. I am really anxious to get color down on this guy (painting in oils) – he’s incredible.

This canvas is 18″ x 36″. Mmhmm. That means this Great Blue Heron will be just shy of life sized at around 30″ tall. This will be an amazing piece indeed – thanks Laura!

Michael Fräse is a dear friend of mine, he’s a mentor and one of my all-time favorite artists . He has motivated me when I felt like giving up, spoken words of wisdom that ring in my ears every time I pick up a brush – every time I consider a new painting. Our mutual admiration has extended to the technological side of our work, and with that we have been working together, alongside E.Webscapes to create a working gallery to display his paintings in an appropriate environment.

If you can imagine, my blogging friends, creating 197+ blog entries in 12 hours or less, you’ll know what my day was like yesterday. Lisa coded up the stylesheets a few months ago, and I’ve been working on the content, plugins, and tweaking the code as needed. My carpel tunnel caused me excruciating pain lastnight, I couldn’t even type an open bracket for code without letting out a gasp in pain. I slept with my wrist brace on lastnight, and it feels better today – although I’ll have to make it a short day on the keyboard to fully recoup.

For now, and I have a lot of work to do yet, please browse over to Michael’s new website. His work is beautiful and inspiring. It should be a couple of days before I post the final screenshot and add him to my completed project list – but I couldn’t wait, worked too hard yesterday to not share what I’ve been working on! You’ll be able to order prints directly from him later this week if you’re interested, too.

Go on! Check out Vikingwolf.com !

As promised, I finished Littles today (this is an 8×8 oil painting). I’ll varnish both Littles and Joey over the weekend and scan them to post detail shots. They’ll both be on their way home at the beginning of next week.

(You can view both cat paintings and their paintings as they progressed in the Cat Portrait category.)

Joey’s portrait is complete! It will take a few days for the painting to dry before I varnish and scan the details for you to see in a finished state. It’s a little bitty 4×4 painting, as you might be able to tell from the quarter sitting beside it.

This is the completed underpainting, and it’s going to take nearly a week to dry with all of the pure indigo I used in his suit. I’ll be working on other projects until I can get back to this one and work on the next layer.

(Colors vary from previous WIP shots because I ran out of daylight.)

I’ve got the skintone all blocked in, now the challenge will be to make them look like them, and not just people. Right now they have general shapes and color, and after I complete the underpainting (clothing included) and go back to detail the painting, their personalities will start to emerge.

You can see the photograph of the bride & groom that I’m working from. I’ve just worked in the background, and started underpainting the whites in the couples clothing. I’ll be working on the skintones for a while, getting a very rough layer of values for their skin and clothing. The background though, is finished for the most part. I modified the horizon line from the photograph, and matched the colors of the sunset really well. It does give a nice ambience to their portrait already, and I’m happy with how it turned out.

This is another sketch, it’s a 12″ x 16″ wedding portrait I’ll be painting (in oils).

I’ve got a few irons in the fire right now so if posting is sparse you know why.