DAILY PAINTING: The changes made since yesterday are subtle but important. You can see that I removed the mask, which created the wavy lines, and I made some color and value adjustments. I consider it finished at this point. I'll look at it again in a day or two to make sure. It's called "Down Under" (not only because of our friends in Australia) but because I've been thinking about the fact that you often can't know what's going on in a person's life just from outward ap

DAILY PAINTING: Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! Now it's back to work for all of us. I had several goals for this painting: strengthen the burnt sienna, brighten a bit of the yellow, add some dark to the lower composition and make the upper composition less cool. Those few drips were happy accidents, which created necessary verticals to counterbalance the horizontals. The painting is in the drying room now. We'll see whether I'll be able to finish it up tomorro

DAILY PAINTING: You last saw this artwork as a pastel study, and here's the first layer of paint on the actual painting (looks a little blurry, I think!). It's in the drying room right now so that it might be dry enough to paint on tomorrow. You see that I'm working with very thin paint (mixed with cold wax, so that I can scrape into it, if I want to). I like it so far!

DAILY PAINTING: This is a rough color study, done in chalk pastels for my latest abstract, to be painted over the collage that I showed you earlier. The palette is very limited (something I've been focusing on lately), but it seems to work. You can already see the balance of values. If it works in a sketch this rough, then there's a good chance it'll work to a greater degree in the much more refined painting.

DAILY PAINTING: Here's a pencil line drawing of a basic composition for my latest abstract. Sorry it's so hard to see! Pencil is very hard to photograph well. But I think you can see enough to get a sense of the overall intention. You might remember, before I began working on "October", that I had done a small, 14 x 17" collage (see previous posts), that I set aside in favor of the larger painting. This drawing is the next step in what began as the collage. Next, I'll