View Up Summit Street

On Thursday I went over to visit my sister, Mickey, in NJ. I had to pick up paintings of hers to take up to a gallery for the New England Watercolor Society Show. Usually we spend the day out doing some sketching but she was waiting for a call from the auto mechanic about her car so we stayed at her house. I did this painting from her living room looking up her street.

Dino and Sally

We had a very snow morning on Tuesday for our portrait group and a poor turnout. It ended up there was the model, Sally, and me. Dino has posed for us before and I find him a bit difficult to paint. He has a very square face and no character lines. Looking at this on the screen I see I didn't make his shoulders wide enough. Usually he models for college art classes (nude) not for portraits. Maybe his body is more exciting to sketch. lol

When I knew I had to stop putting paint on Deano's portrait I did a quick sketch of Sally sketching Dino. Now her face has character! 

Again if you haven't seen my art presentation the link is here and also at the top of the sidebar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_j89QfuJY&index=50&list=PLF8DDE9C62201A9CB

Snowy Farm

I enjoy driving around and seeing farmland that is still being used for farms on Long Island. So much  is gone due to residential developments. The other day I wanted to sketch something with snow so I took a ride out near Wading River about 25 minutes northeast of me. There were a lot of good views...but with no place to park my car due to the banks of snow. Finally I spotted this. I loved that the green was showing a little where some vehicle had driven through or maybe the wind and sun had just worked their magic to let it peek through.

If you've seen the link below please ignore the following message. I know some people only get to check blogs once a week or less.

Back in my post for Nov. 18, 2014 I had posted a photo of myself doing my presentation for the Wet Paints Studio Group in Sayville. I spoke about art and my life and brought along examples of my drawings, collage, paintings, and sketchbooks. I promised all of you that when the video of my presentation was available I would post a link to it. Well...it has been on youTube for a while, but I had been posting so much here that I didn't want to overwhelm the pages. Now that things are a little quieter I am posting it. It is a little over an hour long so if you want to watch it you may want to do it in more than one sitting. lol Enjoy and tell me what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_j89QfuJY&index=50&list=PLF8DDE9C62201A9CB

Frozen Lake

The other day I was looking for a winter view to sketch and headed up to Middle Island. It was mostly frozen with small openings of water, which I'm sure made the birds very happy. This is Artists Lake, aptly named. lol The sketch is about 4 x 6.

For those of you who didn't see my video link yesterday here it is again.

Back in my post for Nov. 18, 2014 I had posted a photo of myself doing my presentation for the Wet Paints Studio Group in Sayville. I spoke about art and my life and brought along examples of my drawings, collage, paintings, and sketchbooks. I promised all of you that when the video of my presentation was available I would post a link to it. Well...it has been on youTube for a while, but I had been posting so much here that I didn't want to overwhelm the pages. Now that things are a little quieter I am posting it. It is a little over an hour long so if you want to watch it you may want to do it in more than one sitting. lol Enjoy and tell me what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_j89QfuJY&index=50&list=PLF8DDE9C62201A9CB

Citarella View & Video Link to My Presentation

Last Friday my friend had to go out to East Hampton to drop off something for a client and take care of a few things. I went along for company and to help her get the end tables into the client's house. I must say that mostly I closed and opened doors while she carried the pieces. When she was finished we went to Citarella on Main Street in East Hampton to have lunch and do a quick sketch. I had enough time to sketch this and just began adding color when we had to leave, so the rest of it I finished at home.

Back in my post for Nov. 18, 2014 I had posted a photo of myself doing my presentation for the Wet Paints Studio Group in Sayville. I spoke about art and my life and brought along examples of my drawings, collage, paintings, and sketchbooks. I promised all of you that when the video of my presentation was available I would post a link to it. Well...it has been on youTube for a while, but I had been posting so much here that I didn't want to overwhelm the pages. Now that things are a little quieter I am posting it. It is a little over an hour long so if you want to watch it you may want to do it in more than one sitting. lol Enjoy and tell me what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_j89QfuJY&index=50&list=PLF8DDE9C62201A9CB

(If for some reason the link doesn't work, please let me know. You can also find it by going to Wet Paints Studio Group's website: http://www.wetpaintsgroup.com. All the way at the bottom of the page there is a link to the Wet Paints Video Archive and when that opens I am the next to last one on the list...Joan Tavolott. They are in order by date.)

World Wide SketchCrawl #46 at the Planting Fields Arboretum

The NYC Urban Sketchers somehow missed scheduling a crawl on Saturday for the WW SketchCrawl #46 on Saturday. So my friend, Susan, and I decided to do a Long Island version. She suggested going to the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. Go to an arboretum with the frigid temps we had on Saturday??? Yes!!! Aside from walking from the car to the main greenhouse and out of the building to use the restrooms, we were in a beautiful, tropical wonderland. The only thing missing was someone delivering tropical drinks to us. The sun was shining and we took off our down jackets, hats, gloves, scarves, and heavy sweaters and settled in to sketch. We even thought ahead to bring our lunches (my idea) because heaven forbid we starve. lol

I started with a flowering bromeliad.

Then I moved on to sketch the anthuriums.

I liked the view down the length of the greenhouse.

There were more bromeliads to sketch....

lots of orchids...

and other tropical plants.

Susan took a photo of me sketching. It looks like I'm in a tropical forest.

Photo by Susan Toplitz

At 4:00 they came and told us they were closing the greenhouse for the day, or we would have kept sketching until it got too dark. We were in a magical, special world and oblivious to the weather conditions outside until we had to put on all our winter gear for the walk back to the car.

Sky Collage

As a conclusion to the "30 Paintings in 30 Days" challenge, Leslie Saeta had the participants create a collage of their paintings. I couldn't find a way to put all 30 of my paintings into the collage without cutting off parts of the paintings, so a few are missing here.

Doing the challenge was a lot of fun, but at times I was working on the next day's post at the last minute.  I think I did realize that I liked more color in the skies than I started with on my first two paintings. The drama of the clouds and color help make the painting. I hope when I am out plein air painting I will remember that.