Oregon Junco Bird Art Painting, Daily Painting No. 10

Okay, I'm moving along at a better pace now.  This is my tenth painting, a painting of a little male Oregon junco, a subspecies of the dark-eyed junco, a species of the American sparrow.  They are prevalent in my home state of Oregon, and over a large part of the Northwest as well.  As I've been trying to do paintings in and about Oregon, I've been researching some of the wildbirds commonly seen here.  This little guy -- and his friends -- plays outside my house in some bare bushes.  They are amazingly tiny and so much fun to watch!

The original painting is available on my website, http://www.dottiedracos.com.  It's an acrylic painting on an 8x10x3/4" canvas, with the sides painted the same color as the background.  It's wired to hang immediately, either with or without a frame.

I have twenty paintings to go in my Daily Painting self-challenge, and I do feel that I'm finally starting to benefit greatly from my challenge.  One of the things I've most learned about is using my palette more wisely.  In the past, I included way too many colors of paint straight out of the tubes instead of mixing my own colors.  With this bird, I had a palette of three colors:  phthalocyanine blue (cyan blue), magenta, Naples yellow, plus white.  So I had a lot of mixing to do, but I feel I am really getting to know the properties of each color I use now.  It's amazing to me how many wonderful colors, including a dark purplish black, that I can create with just these three colors.

Blue and Gold Macaw, Parrot, with Toy Ball, Daily Painting #6, July 22, 2010

Here's my painting for today -- again, too ambitious.  It's #6, painted July 22, 2010.  I think I did okay on it, but it took way, way too long and didn't allow me to do my regular work, too.  But it was a lot of fun to learn, and I can see that I am already learning tons more than I was learning by just doing custom paintings.  This difficult grind of doing a painting a day I think is going to pay off in huge rewards after even just a few months.  I'm not claiming at all to be even a half-good painter, but I think that by learning and studying and DOING (Nike was right with their "Just Do It" slogan), I'm going to progress to be a better and better painter much more rapidly than I would have if I hadn't undertaken this endeavor.  Let me know what you think. 

I went to the bookstore today and bought another art book, this time on color theory.  It blows me away.  You know what, I studied neuroscience for nearly five years in graduate school, and this study of art makes that seem like child's play --- seriously!  This is a lot of complex stuff to learn and then to keep juggling it all in your mind and through your hands while at the same trying to do a painting - really, it's amazing that anyone can ever, ever master it all.  But I love, love, love a good challenge - always have - and this is the best and most difficult one yet.  And it'll take me the entire rest of my life to even begin to begin to grasp it.  I can't remember who it was, but some really accomplished artist was reputedly said to have stated right before he died something like "and I was just beginning to get it."  I know that's very crudely paraphrased, but you get the idea.

Well, anyway, this painting and print are both listed on my website and on my Artfire studio (yes, I'm starting to use it more and more as a "gallery" to showcase my artwork).  Here's the link:  http://www.artfire.com/users/LarkStudios. 

Okay, onto that subject, Artfire, as I've mentioned before, I am getting to like it more and more all the time -- but I still am not selling well on it.  I'll let you know if and when that changes; I expect it will.  As I may have mentioned before, there's a way to have it be the "store" for my website, some sort of seamless linkage.  When I have the time to figure all that out, I think it will really pay for itself (which it has to do at some point or I'll have to drop it.)  But again, I expect it will before too long.

A Cordon Bleu Fince painting

Here's my little painting from yesterday:  A little finch with a fancy name:  Cordon Bleu finch.  I enjoyed painting it. 

Now, today I must do another dog painting.  I'm slowing returning to dogs but am still going to continue to paint other subjects, too.  Wish me luck!

A Macaw painted by my daughter, Lara Aguilera-Mogensen

Here's a painting done by my daughter, Lara, recently.  She doesn't have a blog yet, so I'm taking the liberty of listing a few of her paintings on my blog until she does - so I can show off her work, of course!

This is a parrot, obviously, a macaw, I think.  We had for many, many years another kind of parrot, a blue-fronted Amazon, named Jolie.  She was a sweetheart with a voice that would break crystal!  But we loved her very, very much.  She left us, though, and went to live with some neighbors who had several Amazons, with whom she immediately bonded.  Fickle bird!  No, really, she was much happier because she was alone, with only us as companions, and she's much happier now with all the other parrots.  We were really boring, I think, and didn't appreciate her fine voice nearly as much as her other bird-friends did.  Here's Lara's website address:  http://marezidoats.com/.  The name of the site is a cute one, by the way:  Lara also teaches horseback riding (dressage specifically), and the name "marezidoats" stems from a song that my mother sang to me when I was small and that I subsequently sang to her:  It starts like this (written much, much more clearly than it's sung) Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy.  A kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?"
(It sounds more like marezidoats 'n doesidoats, 'n liddlelamseadivy.  A kid'lleadivy,too,wouldn't you?)