This is one of the paintings I've finished recently: a little alpaca, or also called a vicuña. They're related to the llama and the camel but are smaller and awfully cute. It's just one more of my farm-animal paintings I've been doing lately. I'm still really enjoying doing them and even went to the Oregon State Fair yesterday and took a ton of photos (most of them awful!!) that I hope to get a few more farm animal paintings made from. (I never thought about how the animals are in stalls and not sitting prettily in fields. I'll see what I can do with them, though. If they don't work, I guess I'll have to go back out into the country and see what I can find.)
If you have any photos of farm animals that you wouldn't mind if I use for paintings, I would really appreciate it if you could send some to me, dottiedracos@gmail.com (my new email address for the time being at least). I'll give you a free 8x10 print of the painting if I do use one of your photos.
I've been making a few other changes lately, too. I'm dropping my website of 16 years because -- well, for various reasons. Some of the more important ones are: one, the software provided with it doesn't work very well and crashes frequently; two, I've been having trouble getting my shopping cart to work correctly (that led to disasterous results recently); three, I feel I'm being ignored by the webhost; and, lastly, I'm being charged a much higher monthly rate than the current monthly rate for my level of hosting service - and cannot get the webhost to respond or to lower my monthly fee. (The hosting service, by the way, is Yahoo; so at this time I certainly wouldn't recommend them to anyone just starting a website or thinking of switching.)
Back to work now on my latest painting, a long-haired dachshund that someone at Portland Saturday Market graciously allowed me to photograph and paint. He's a beauty; can't wait to see how he finishes up.
