Category: Art

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Art Drawing Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

Strange Light, Weird Palette

Experimental Palette Portrait, gouache, 10x7”
Experimental Palette Portrait, gouache, 10×7”

What was I thinking? The reference photo1 had strange lighting. From the left was a cold, greenish light, and from the right a very red light. To make the painting even more “fun,” I chose a weird limited palette2.

Below are my two preliminary pencil drawings and the painting, second layer done. I should have left it as it was—blocky, but fresh. Instead I labored over it, trying to match values and colors to the original despite the crazy palette.

I forgot how much I love gouache’s immediacy vs. forever fussing and overworking. By the time I decided to stop it was way overcooked and I wanted to start over to get it “right.” I refrained and moved on to the next painting with happier results.

  1. I don’t have permission to share it ↩︎
  2. Viridian green (a weak, transparent green), Permanent Rose, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Pale and white (from a very old tube with thick sticky paint). No black or other dark colors. ↩︎
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Art

Daylight Savings End Eve=Xmas Eve

Daylight Savings Eve, 5×8” Ink, Neocolor II, Inktense pencils

The end of Daylight Savings is my favorite day of the year! It’s like Christmas Eve—I love knowing I get a free hour to use as a “Do-Over” sometime during the day, after I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of one sort or another.

And I fall into a lot of rabbit holes, thanks to ADHD and its “time blindness” feature.

Like today, I was about to do a Peloton cycling class but found myself finally clearing out all the bags and bins of lockdown-era flours for bread making instead.

Then I moved on to the containers of dried beans and peas I’ll never cook. I posted the beans on my local Buy Nothing group. Hopefully someone who is still friends with legumes can enjoy some soup making. 

I finally did the fun cycling class, but so late that lunch after was at 4:00 pm. And finally got in the studio and drew this to celebrate Daylight Savings End Eve.

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Art Sketchbook Pages

Goat Self Portrait, Because Bouc & Caprine

“Le Bouc Caprine” Colored pencil and Neocolor II in Stillman & Birn Epsilon sketchbook, 10×8”

Yesterday, while reading The Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, I came across a word I didn’t know: “caprine.” In a painting of the sisters, “the artist had given their faces a caprine quality.” A quick dictionary lookup said it means “relating to or resembling goats.” Yikes.

But I was delighted to find a new word for one of my favorite animals. Then it hit me: my last name, Bouc*, also means goat! (Billy goat, actually.) I immediately had to find a goat photo to sketch for the day’s self-portrait.

Preliminary sketch in colored pencils (that I colored over)

Which version do you like better? I think I should have stopped with the quirkier, more curious, more me, colored pencil version. But I wanted to keep playing and added Neocolor II crayons on top. One day I might learn to stop sooner rather than later.

*Bouc was my ex-husband’s family name, but I kept it after we parted. I’ve had that last name much longer than my father’s last name — a name I never liked and that wasn’t even really ours. My grandfather, a refugee from Kiev, was given it at Ellis Island because they said his real name couldn’t be spelled in English.

Me if I was a goat, photo reference:

Photographer: Andy Bodemir on Unsplash.com
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Art

If I Were an Animal (self-portrait?)

Coatimundi, 8×5”, colored pencils and Neocolor II

I’ve been doing a daily self-portrait in my journal since June. Today’s self-portrait took a detour—I drew an animal I’d like to be instead, because, why not? My journal, my rules.

I met a cute, young, friendly coatimundi* when I was traveling around Costa Rica years ago. We had stopped at Tilajari, a resort where we hoped to stay, but all the rooms were taken by the crew of the movie Congo, which was being filmed in the jungle nearby.

The proprietor was kind enough to give us a tour of the resort, which he had created from a dream and built and landscaped over 15 years. After petting the coatimundi, I reached up to pet a big toucan sitting on a low branch of a tree.

The toucan gently snatched the ring on my finger with its enormous yellow bill and started tugging at it. Our host laughed and told me these toucans were trained to steal gold. I guess he figured out my ring was silver because it released my finger and flew higher up in the tree.

*Coatimundis are in the raccoon family but are not nocturnal like raccoons, and they have funny snouts a little like pigs. The males are solitary and the females and their young band together in social groups of up to 25. The males only join them during mating season.

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Art Life in general

Sketching Saved the Day

Happy Guy Sketch from a photo on Sktchy App

I had a terrible, scary day that included a near poisoning of my dog and other misfortunes, that left me a nervous wreck. Finally, in the evening, I spent some time in my studio sketching this cheery guy from the Museum/Sktchy app that completely changed my pissy mood and I went to bed happy. Here’s what happened:

A big slob of a PGE utility guy came to check my gas meter. When my dog barked, he threw big chunks of a leftover cookie that was in his pocket (who keeps loose cookies in their pockets?) to her over the fence.

He tried to tell me it was dog treats but I quickly saw it was pieces of an oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookie. I knew chocolate was bad for dogs but I learned that 7-8 raisins or grapes are enough to cause death from kidney failure. 

I couldn’t tell how much she ate before I found the mess of chunks and crumbs and cleaned it up. The internet said it was a veterinary emergency and to immediately call the ASPCA Pet Poison Control Center. I paid $95 to spend an hour on the phone with them.

While the toxicologist and vet were consulted and I was on hold, I made an urgent care appointment to have her stomach “pumped.” Finally the Poison control doctors decided that if she ate less than 7 raisins we could watch and wait for 48 hours so I cancelled the urgent care vet appointment.

Then I made the call to PGE to report his awful behavior, AND that he put a bag of his trash including a “Brief Relief urinal bag” and wet wipes and more gross stuff in my garbage can and left trash on the ground. PGE promised to pay the $95 and any other associated costs. And to do something about that guy.

Update: good news, it’s now past 48 hours and she’s OK!

Miss Millie, my 12 year old dog, a formerly feral street puppy from Taiwan
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Art Book review

Why I’m Not There Anymore: Goodbye Facebook and Instagram

I knew that Mark Zuckerberg was a terrible person, but after I read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, I knew I had to leave his Meta universe.

This is a MUST READ book for anyone who uses Facebook, Instagram and other Meta apps. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and all of their henchmen are so incredibly evil, and have seriously, negatively, powerfully affected EVERYTHING, including the last US election.

They had a huge Trump marketing team embedded at Facebook before the 2024 election. The team produced MILLIONS of posts with negative disinformation intended to cause conflicts, followed by appeals for money. They used the money raised to place more FB disinformation content and more ads. The more money Trump’s campaign made, the more money Mark made. The more information they collected, the more they could precisely target vulnerable users.

The author is a woman who wanted to work for FB as an international ambassador, thinking she could help them build a world community for good. She eventually convinced them to create and hire her for her dream job and worked intimately with Mark, Sheryl and the top leaders for about a decade.

The book is fascinating and shocking and the author is a really good writer. Her New Zealand accent makes her narration of the audiobook seem charming, even as it details the horrors and nightmares she personally experienced and witnessed within FB and around the world as they interfered with international elections, civil rights and government regulations.

It’s so much worse than I could have imagined. Pure evil.

PS While I’m no longer posting to FB and IG, you can find me on my blog and my Substack. I’m loving the inspiring art community on Substack.

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Art Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

Gouache Portrait of Taylor Kinney from Chicago Fire

Taylor Kinney as Kelly Severide from Chicago Fire on TV,
Gouache on paper 9×7”

I know, this was a silly project. But there’s something about this guy on this show that I find intriguing in an odd sort of way. So I painted him in gouache.

I have no idea what he’s like in real life, but it amuses me how on the show he always has this derpy, slightly perplexed expression, like he isn’t quite sure what’s going on around him. Also that when he started on Chicago Fire he played the angry bad boy and now he plays a kindhearted husband and friend (while still doing all the badass fireman stuff.)

I find it interesting that he was once Lady Gaga’s boyfriend. It’s a little hard to picture them together. She’s such a powerful persona.

Chicago Fire and Chicago Med are both dumb, guilty pleasures I enjoy. My usual TV fare is Britbox European detective shows and Nordic noir.

Taylor Kinney as Kelly Severide on Chicago Fire, gouache portrait
Reference snapshot from TV
Categories
Art Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

My Bestie B Being Silly: Portrait in Gouache

Portrait of B in gouache
B Being Silly, gouache on paper, 9×6”

My bestie B was giving away an arm chair and my sister asked for a photo of her sitting in it to get an idea of its size. So she perched in the chair, made a face and took a selfie.

I cropped it down to just her pretty face to try to capture her sense of fun in a painting. After 3 drawings I finally got everything at the right angles. My brain kept trying to straighten everything out and make it symmetrical.

Then came 3 paintings. The first one went directly in the trash. The second one was better but when it reached gouache’s “ugly stage” I lost my confidence and started over again.

This is the third one. I can see a few things I could fix if I kept working on it, but my current goal is to stop painting sooner rather than too late. Also I’m using gouache these days partly because it doesn’t allow the forever fiddling that oil does. At a certain point gouache just says, “Nope” and stops cooperating if you try to keep adding paint or fiddling.

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Art Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

Brian from Police IT Department: Gouache Portrait

Brian from IT, Gouache on paper 9×12”

His name isn’t really Brian. I took a photo of him from the TV screen when I watching a European detective show on BritBox because I found the colors mesmerizing.

I don’t remember which show it was, but he was the sweet, smart guy who could always be relied on to find the solutions on his computer. Even though most of those European detective/police procedural shows follow a similar formula, with a similar set of characters (like the sweet IT nerd guy), I still thoroughly enjoy them.

Photo reference from the TV

It was challenging but fun to draw and paint from the above photo reference. I really wanted to capture his sweet expression and the vivid colors. It took me 4 drawings and then starting over after abandoning a painting before I was satisfied. I had such a great time with the headphones! But I got lazy with his shirt and left off the plaid because I was ready to move on.

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Art Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

Grumpy Old Brit Character Actor

Portrait in gouache of old British male character
Old Brit Character Actor, Gouache, 10×7”

My last painting of 2024 is this gouache painting of a British or Irish character actor from one of the great detective shows on BritBox (but I forget which one).

I tried to do a Google reverse search from the photo I took from the TV (see below) to learn his name but it failed, giving me everything from Donald Trump (?!) to an advertisement for tweed jackets. Do you know who he is?

After dong a couple sketches it was time to paint. I was inspired to use gouache instead of oils because I hate the way my oil paintings almost always end up taking forever and feeling overworked while I try over and over to perfect it.

I don’t do that with gouache, I get more carefree, playful and have fun. It had been nearly a year since I used gouache and it felt like I’d forgotten everything.

This was my get-reacquainted with gouache painting and I’m excited to start the next one, also a still from a TV show.

Who am I? Reference screen still from TV