Oops, what is one of those golden rules of marketing? Never promise something you can’t deliver? Well, I said I was going to try to do one feather a day this month. I did qualify that as maybe one a day. Well, here it is, February 4th and here is my first feather. This is a feather from one of my sister’s Sun Conures, either Tap or Jazz. Funny, noisy, happy birds! This is painted in gouache on watercolor paper; the feathers I paint on vellum take me at least 3x as long to paint. I couldn’t get a good scan of it and tried to photograph it, still not too good, but here it is.

Sun Conure Feather – gouache on paper

Once a day paintings are very hard for me to do as my style is so detailed. The Eagle Owl is only 5.5″ x 7″ and I worked on it steadily over a 4 week time period. So part of this challenge for myself is to find a way to paint a little quicker on some paintings but to still satisfy my need for attention to detail and quality. The ACEO cards are part of that challenge for me; it is sometimes a relief to allow myself to paint in a looser style. The ultimate in loose painting for me is how I paint my yarns; I pick my colors, fill up squirt bottles and jam jars with those colors, and then paint with the bottles and syringes full of color. Freeing, fulfilling, and nice and messy!

Here are a few examples of my yarns

Handpainted yarn – Painted Desert

Summer Days – painted yarn

And now for my Works in Progress!

I have started a watercolor on vellum painting of heirloom dry shell beans that I got from Purity Farms at the Coventry CT WinterFresh Farmer’s Market. I started with four varieties and then saw the other three the last time I vendored at the market, Cool! So I rearranged the groups and away we go, slowly…

Heirloom Shell beans -beginning

The two beans on the right hand edge are real beans!

Heirloom Shell beans – day 2

All of these are painted. I will do the drop shadows at the end of the painting so that I can make them all uniform and believable. Stayed tuned…