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In my mid-20’s I moved to an area far from where I grew up. I began writing letters to my parents, and we continued that for the next 15 years. Many of my letters were decorated with my own artwork. After my dad passed away two years ago, my mom found a box of my old letters they had saved. This was one of them, written in the Fall of 1987. Hand-painted with watercolors, with metallic gold ink on the lettering. Seeing that hand-painted letter from so long ago inspired me to m

Scout's triple portrait is finished. Below is what Annette wrote about her partnership with this amazingly accomplished Border Collie. Prismacolor pencil and acrylic wash on “Flannel Grey” Canson Mi-Teintes paper 20 x 26 inches. Annette wrote: “Scout has been an incredible addition to my life. I met him as a 5 year old, recently retired from a busy working life as a goose hazer protecting workers from angry geese. I have had 3 previous Border Collies but Scout has expanded my

When I was adding the colored pencil to connect these two scenes, fading the straw of the barn-hunt scene into the grass of the Frisbee scene, it was necessary to see the entire composition as a whole. So when I finished adding the straw in a way that felt like it looked good, to check whether it needed anything more I taped the artwork up on the wall of my studio, and stood back to see what the artwork would look like as the client would view it in their home.  I saw then th

This album shows my technique for making straw in a scene. A whole lot of it. 1 In my last post, I had finished the Frisbee scene, and put in a bit of the straw detail around Scout’s barn-hunt figure on the gold underpainting. It looked like this:  Next I have a whole lot of straw to fill in. If you read my post about barn hunt, you know that Scout is searching for rats hidden among straw. There will be a tunnel entrance below and in front of his face. That’s where you see th

The two action figures in Scout’s triple portrait are finished, and now I have a decision to make: Should I finish the grass around the Frisbee figure first, or the straw around the barn hunt figure?  Pic 1 explains why that decision was important, and the rest of the pics show how I resolved it.  1 At this point the backgrounds are just flat color, no detail. You may remember I masked off the two action figures so I could do Scout’s black-and-white coat with colored pencils