January Newsletter
Happy New Year (and a belated Merry Christmas too)!
I (of course) was a bit too optimistic about what I could complete at the end of last year, and when I obviously wasn’t getting it all done, I decided to take a little break for Christmas 🙂
I’ve set some pretty vigorous goals for this year as well – I’ve even set out a tentative schedule of themes/ topics to paint for every week this year, though I’m sure they’ll change as I see how well I can keep up. In any case, I’m pretty excited about how I plan to challenge myself this year.
One of those challenges is to paint more people, as it’s a very tough topic for me as I’ve mentioned before. I started by painting a few test paintings of “Dancers” in December (each is 8×8″, and they will be available in my Etsy store this Thursday):
I was pretty happy with the results, but they definitely took a lot longer than my usual paintings. I decided to make larger versions (each is 20×20″) of three of them for this week (they’ll be available in my Etsy store this Saturday):
Another challenge is to paint on things other than canvas. I’ve been experimenting with some small handmade boxes:
There are some unpainted ones in the back, some that I’ve tried felting on the inside (top right in red and the middle one on the far left in black), and one I even tried painting on the inside of the top of the box (bottom right). This has been an interesting challenge, as (1) the boxes don’t have the “tooth” of canvas (they’re very smooth and the paint sometimes moves in unexpected ways), (2) I have to be VERY careful with the edges, (3) figuring out what looks nicest on a box was not always what I imagined in my head! I’m not sure when I’ll make these available as they still need to be finished and I have more ideas as to how to make new fancier boxes, but if you’re reading this, you’re getting a sneak-peak 🙂
I have plenty of other challenges for this year, but I’ll bring those up as I get to them. As to the paintings from the weekly sets since the last newsletter, we had:
“Space”:
“Ships”
“Forests”
I’ve also added a lot of prints to the store last year, and plan to continue adding prints of many pieces – but please let me know if I’ve missed anything that you’d really like to have as a print!
Last year, I introduced frames for the paintings that would fit the canvases that I use, which have been very nice. However, I wanted some that were easier to fit – there was very little wiggle room in the original frames, and some even had to be adjusted because they weren’t all exactly the same size as my “template” canvas used for making the frames. So I ALSO have some new painting frames, which I think also look a lot more stunning. Here’s a few pictures of some of the newer frames:
I love the way these look! I’ll be stocking my store with more like these this year.
I hope everyone’s had a lovely start of the new year and a happy 2021 too 🙂 Thanks for reading my little newsletter!