Paint parties are fun!

I love holding paint parties and introducing the fun of watercolor painting to people that may never have painted before.

Pet Portraits

As we get closer to Christmas, I get more orders for pet portraits to be given  as gifts.  What can be more personal than gifting someone with a painting of their beloved pet.  These are some from this week.  One woman ordered paintings in two sizes.  She wanted one for their home and one for the RV.  I love being able to share in this way.

Remembering our Fur Kids

Often I am asked to paint someone's pet after they passed on.  It always seems like a sacred experience for me to do because I really want to help capture the essence of the animal that passed in spite of not having met them.  Other times I'm asked to paint the pets of people's children to be given as gifts and sometimes, as a pet nears their time with us, someone will ask me to paint them so they have something special to remember them by.  Whatever the reason, I feel a deep sense of awe and gratitude that they chose me to do this for them.  Here are just a few of my recent commissions.

Beginning Watercolor

I LOVE introducing people to the joys of painting and watercolor is such a great medium to work with.  I teach weekly classes through our community's art club where we can go into more detail developing a painting and I also lead paint parties.  The paint parties are 3 hours long and I introduce people to the subject we'll be painting and demonstrate the various steps to painting that subject.  My goal is to have people fall in love with painting where they want to explore it even further.

I was asked to have another paint party so people could paint an EMU.  Yep, the emu was so popular last year that those who didn't come wanted a chance to paint it.  Here is their work.  Please note, only a couple attending had ever painted before.

Since it is fall and the EMU paint party quickly filled up, I decided to offer another paint party, this time teaching how to paint the colors found in the maple leaf this time of year. Once again the majority attending had not painted before!  Didn't they all do great!!!

Another Pan Pastel

I usually keep quite busy with my commissions for painting people's pets using watercolor but found a little free time this past week to break out my pan pastels and practice using them.  I say practice because I'm fairly new to this medium and totally self taught.  I love how I am able to mix just a few colors to make almost any color I need.

Black background?

In my commission work, I have often been asked to not put a background in or just use a simple background so the focus can be on the dog or person.  I recently decided to try painting more realistically but use black watercolor in the background as a way to pull your eyes to the focal point.  Here are three of my recent works in this style.

Watercolor Portraits

I've been having fun with painting some quick watercolor portraits to use in a demonstration I'm doing next week for a neighboring art club.