Oregon State Fair

The empty horse arena.  It's an amazing building.

A beautiful sheep who is going to be in a painting soon.  I'll have to find out what kind she is.

A llama with attitude!

We took a break from everything yesterday and went to the Oregon State Fair, in Salem.  It's been something we've done since we moved here to Portland 20 years ago last month, so it has become quite an established tradition.  It was the first time we've gone on the opening day, so there wasn't much going on.  The upside, though, is that all the exhibitors were fresh, not jaded; the animals were clean and not bored out of their minds yet (though a bit frightened at being in a new place), and the entire place was nice and clean.  The big downside was the horse arena, where we go every year to see the same horses, the same wagons, the same everything -- and nothing was happening!  We saw a few miniature horse competitions, some with only one entrant - who always got "first place" - and that was about it.  We ate the same treat as we do every year, a caramel apple, but this year my little granddaughter shook things up a bit:  she bought some cotton candy, which everyone tasted and everyone except her, of course, complained that it just didn't taste the way it used to.  We all got way, way too much sun, walked -- no, ambled -- way, way too much -- and had a great, great day!  I've attached a few photos I took, some of which will become paintings.              

A brown Swiss Cow that I think will become a painting!

Alpaca painting

Once again, I've been remiss at getting my posts up, and I'll really, really, really try harder to do so from now on.  Summer has been here; and although I have been painting regularly, I've also been busy with gardening, playing with my granddaughter, visiting with the rest of my family, attending Portland Saturday Market regularly now!  Well, as you can see, I've been busy.

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.