Shearing Time is Here, sheep painting.

I wanted to do "fuzzy" so I painted this sheep. I used her for a warm up exercise. She isn't some great painting, she's just for fun.

Same with the dog, I'll be working on it today and maybe finish him, he isn't drawn correctly yet, he's still looking funny. So I gotta fix that. I might have to draw him all over again and make him smaller so he fits the canvas better. I get carried away sometimes!

Thanks for stopping by my blog and have a great day! :)
donna

Accident with Aluminum Wheel

 We were coming home from an auction the other day where we'd bought an old camper on a pickup trailer. We were coming down the gravel roads and traveling slow when a rim blew on the right front of the pickup. I was driving as Robert just had surgery on his shoulder. Long story but he got hurt at work two years ago, since then, he's had his back fused, his neck fused, his left shoulder replaced and his now his right shoulder rotator cuff repaired. He had such a tear in that cuff! The doctor said the top of his arm was pushing up through the tear, wearing a hole in the edge of the cup at the top of the shoulder. They were able to push the arm back into a correct position, then they placed four anchors into the rotator cuff and created what they called a suture bridge over the hole, trying to pull it together. The insurance has waited two years to do this surgery so the muscles and tendons were retracting and the doc was barely able to pull the tear together. He had to graft tissue into the hole and hopes it will all grow together to create a once again useable arm for Robert. So here we are, tooling down the road with this old camper behind us when the rim blows. Robert was in Viet Nam. When the rim blew, he would have hit the deck if he was able to...it sounded like a shot gun went off in the cab. We managed to change the tire and get on our way again. I'm posting this because we had just had new tires put on the truck. At the tire shop, they used a tire machine to change the tires for us. After we brought the truck home with the new tires on, the same right front that blew, went flat. We took it back to the tire shop, and they checked it over. Told us we needed to put a tube in that tire and it would be ok. The moral to the story is, it wasn't ok. I suppose we would have been nearly killed if we'd been going down the highway 55 miles an hour. Don't let a tire shop use an old style tire machine on your aluminum wheels. It cracks the wheels and causes them to blow apart under pressure. Now that we're still alive, we'll be having a lot of fun in that old camper we bought, but we will be changing out the wheels to steel ones. See you on Benchmark this summer! Donna

Quick Sketches, charcoal and pastel.

When I haven't drawn anything or painted for a while, such as when I spent time at the Charlie Russell show....I like to get into the groove again by doing some sketching. These are some images I sketched out, maybe spending 10-20 minutes on each one. I don't try to make them perfect, I just play. It puts me in the mood to do something more serious!

The hands are fun. I start out by doing them. The Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain thing! Don't look at your hand as you draw it. Sit so you're facing away from your paper and draw your hand in different positions. They look so funny when you're done, but they look just like your hands! It's amazing. Each time I do this, I think what fat, arthritic hands I have! :) Oh well, they still work, that's all I care about.

Donna

Sled dog, Polebridge, MT, charcoal sketch

My dad gave me some reams of paper. He found lots of paper. So I'm doing some quick sketches to begin using it up!

My fire went out in the studio last night, and it got cold. My fingers were getting stiff as boards over there and my coffee was like ice in the cup. So I came back to the house, waiting for it to warm up over there! The pellet stove we put over there is working good but I turned it to the very lowest setting and it went out. I guess you can't do that with a pellet stove as they don't seem to like it. Why put that low setting on them if you can't burn them that way? :)

This is one of the sled dogs I photographed at Polebridge when we went to the sled dog races there. I've never seen so much intensity before! Those dogs are psycho to run. I hope I catch some of their personalities in the sketches and paintings I'll be doing.

I'm starting with a lot of sketches to get more familiar with the dogs and the shapes of them. They aren't like pet dogs in the fact they're so lean, and muscled. Also this intensity of expression they have....I'll draw them until I feel I'm getting somewhere with them.

If you've never been to Polebridge, Mt you need to find it. There's an old store there, been there since the 1800's. They bake bread and the store smells wonderful! The bread is out of this world.

Polebridge is North of Columbia Falls, up the North Fork of the Flathead River.
Donna

Equine art, online show.

If you love seeing horses in art, you'll love the new online show over at the Equine Art Guild.

In our member forum, we began a discussion, looking for ideas for an online show. It came to us, out of all the horses we paint, we seldomly paint our own. We're to busy, painting everyone elses' horses!

It also came out in the discussions, how, if we were free to do portraits of horses in any way we wished, how would we paint them? So we turned ourselves loose with our mediums and brushes and away we went. The show is extraordinary and full. Full of emotion, full of images and full of talent. I feel so honored to belong to this group of equine artists.

Click the link above and see the show, you won't want to miss it.
Donna

Charlie Russell art week, Great Falls, Mt

During one week in March, Great Falls, MT becomes the Western Art Capitol of the world. There are art shows in some of the hotels, at the fair grounds and other places around town.

The Studio 706 Artist Guild, of which I'm a member has a member show in the back room of the History Museum. This year the museum invited some of us to a museum show that will be ongoing for two months. I was honored to be one of the artists chosen. Of course I'm doing the happy dance all around the farm....

Three of my paintings were chosen for the show, "Her Ears are Up", "I'm Coming", and "Girls Night Out".
Donna

The Old Herd Bull, Angus bull, beef bull.

Maybe you raise beef cattle, or possibly you're a city folk and you've driven down country roads to see one of these old herd bulls walking the fence line, staring at the neighbors cattle. Their eyes always look like trouble, they've usually got foam stringing down from their mouths from all the bellowing they've been doing.

If you're a rancher and you need to move the bull to another pasture, you know they might be on the fight when they look like this. Anyway, this old bull made a good subject for a painting! He's 8X10 and painted on a gessoed mdf board with oil paints.

For sale for $50.

Thanks for stopping by, thanks for sharing this blog and my work with any of your friends that might be interested.
Donna