My Dog

For the last year or so, I've fallen out of drawing animals. Drawing each hair takes so much time and I find people, well, more interesting. Animal's portraits cannot express the same emotion that a human can. While a dog may seem to smile, humans have different smiles for different emotions. While a dog may bare his teeth, humans use their entire faces to convey anger. Anyway, a couple days ago, I decided to take the plunge and go through the work of drawing my Golden Retriever. To my surprise, drawing each hair wasn't extremely tedious.

Feather

A couple of days ago, I set out to draw an average feather with far from average colors. Instead, I glanced at the peacock feather in a glass soda bottle on my dresser and thought how awesome it is. They are just such fascinating feathers, changing colors in different lights. To simulate this, I mixed green glitter with some of the paint. All in all, the painting would look a bit better with a different background color, but I'd rather not change that now. 

Perseverance

I began this project confident in my ability with acrylics. Yeah, I've painted before, I can do this. Never before, have I been so wrong. Painting with acrylics does not simply mean sitting down and slapping a few coats of paint on in two hours. My art teacher, Betsy Dill (betsydill.com), showed me how intensive it can be. She taught me about pre-painting techniques and thinning my paint. Sometimes, I must admit, I became rather frustrated when she pointed out details that needed some major attention. But without Ms. Dill, I never would have even finished this picture. She has taught me, among other things, to persevere even when my art looks awful. And so, this blog post is dedicated to her. Thank you so much Ms. Dill!

Oh, I gotta mention that it looks a bit better in person. Somehow the colors tend to look weird when I take pictures of them. 

Cats

Recently I've been working on some more long-term projects, so my normal drawing has suffered. Because of this, here are some photos of a statue I made of my cat last September. It's from air dry clay, so rather fragile. =P