Painting and Designing

The Jewish new year (Rosh Hashanah) starts at sunset on October 2nd. I've started thinking about making cards as I have several people who like to order them every year. One prefers a customized image and that is easy to do with Photoshop. The paintings I've done this year are not really in tune with my thoughts about the holiday so I looked through some of my photos. To buy cards, just go to my website.

I took almost 600 photos in Israel while we were there in March. This one of musicians is from Ein Hod, by the sculptor Benjamin Levy. There are many of his sculptures in the village.

I also liked this sculpture of David and his harp by artist Victor Halvani, but the tree in the background kind of ruins the composition for me.  I did not put this one up on my website, but can make it available. Looking at his web page, it looks like he made several of this sculpture, possibly in different materials. It is beautiful.

When I switched over to a new computer this year I lost all my beautiful Hebrew fonts. I found that the old Hebrew word processing program I had did not work with the new computer even though both are on the same operating system (Windows 7). While Microsoft Word does work in Hebrew, it seems to be a lot more work for me and I'm still trying to figure it out.

I am still painting and sketching, but the summer heat has me down. I do have an air conditioner in my studio so I do not have good excuses for being lazy. I'm also taking online webinars with Johannes Vloothuis. The last one is this Saturday. He's teaching more about composition than techniques, but I am learning a lot about making a painting more interesting and more professional looking.

I made a small acrylic 8 X 10 study first of this image, calling it "Ready to Ride". I'm working on a 16" X 20" painting now.

I actually like the small clip of just the background (the middle photo) the best. I'll continue to work on this over the weekend. The image is from our trip last year to the Canadian Rockies. We went on a raft ride on the Athabasca River. I enjoyed being a tourist and not having to row the raft. We saw a variety of wildlife from the middle of the river. One of my other paintings of the river is on exhibit now in Bedford, NH.  I have an exhibit up at a bank for 6 months. You can see that painting in my postcard from my last post.

On a day when I didn't feel like painting, I did a little sketch of a magpie that I saw in Canada last year.

I started this just as a sketch, but I couldn't resist putting in some color using watercolor pencils. We don't have magpies in New Hampshire (we have crows that are all black) and I understand that they can be very annoying, but I thought he was pretty.