Second Thoughts

It's still early in my fine art career, and so often I look at older canvases and say, "Someday I need to redo this."

Is there a better time than a 5-day Christmas vacation to do just that? Subtract hours lost due to an unhealthy dose of procrastination, and you've still got a few hours there to work on these projects.

Recently I'd redone an older plein air (spellcheck hates that phrase!) painting. I tried to make the trees more realistic, add some more neutrals so the spring colors would pop better, place cleaner details. The result is "Riot of Spring," and to my VERY pleasant surprise, it sold! (The previous version is on the top.)

There was just a tiny bit of this one painting that I wanted to change, and of course if you change one thing you need to go in and work just a tad all around the painting so everything fits. This is "Twilight Tide." (If you click on these pictures, you get a popup with larger images.)

Unfortunately when I was cataloguing this, I discovered that I had this down as an oil painting. I was working in acrylics this week. Uh oh. Oils on top of acrylics? Fine. Acrylics on top of oils? Heavy sigh. I'll let this one sit in my storage unit for a year to see if the paint does anything odd. If it does, I'll fix it. If it's beyond fixing—well, I have a great photograph I can make a print from.

Lesson learned.

Here's something that was causing me a headache. Such a little thing. Can you spot it? "Wilmington 242401." (At that point I was naming things the way one of my teachers recommended. It works well for abstracts and a semi-abstract like this. Maybe.) The colors on the bottom (most recent version) are closer to reality, I'm happy to say. Now that I know how to work the lighting settings, I really like my new camera.

And finally we have "Summer Hay," a quickie I did in a workshop. Didn't realize that reworking this would take as long as it did! I noticed the paint going on oddly, but my records didn't specify what medium this had been painted in originally. I'm going to say that I painted the correct medium, but whatever white I was using is the problem. Again, I'll let it sit just to make sure things are okay before I try to get someone to buy it.

Overall I'm pleased with these revisions. I'm displeased that I might have gotten the mediums wrong, which means that from now on I'll make a subtle notation on the back of each picture as to what medium it was done in. That will mean no headaches in the future—at least from that direction!

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Just a reminder that the Goodreads Book Giveaway for Stalemate is going on right now! With any luck, the book will be released TOMORROW in e-versions, with print coming in about 2 weeks. There will be three lucky winners! And remember: if you sign up for my newsletter (see the top of this page), you'll get a code with which you can get Touch of Danger (the prequel's prequel for Stalemate) for free in your choice of e-version!