31 Days - Day 10

Look what came in the mail on Friday!  It's a hat and notebook from my friends at Lonza Wakersfield. Allen Burgenson of Lonza will be on our Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum development committee as our LAL expert, and Lonza's Product/Brand manager Jody Baller has been wonderful in getting us hooked up. I just love the logo on this hat. It reminds me of my own!  How cool is that?

I went over to the cottage, but before I left I made this underpainting for "Streaming #3" so I wouldn't be delinquent.

I'm sure you can guess where I'm headed with this one. 

31 Days - Day 9

"Streaming #2" 8.5x8.5 pastel on colourfix

31 Days - Day 8

#8of31

"Streaming #1" 8.5x8.5 on Pastelmat

If you are interested in owning any of these little ones, make a comment and I'll get back to you.  This one is $125 unframed.

31 Days - Day 7

This is a very interesting process.  Because I made this commitment, it's not just a commitment to painting daily; it's a commitment to blogging daily, too.  Wow, that first week went by quickly!
The real artwork I did was to clean and sort 3 years' worth of pastels I use for teaching.  I ended up leaving as many shards aside as ended up in the boxes.  I'm saving them all just in case.  I consider this a work of art.

Then I made a silly underpainting and I doubt I'll go any further with it.  It was in a dream I woke up with, though the church in the dream was a white one, not the stone one, and instead of Leyden Street it was a green hill, but what the heck...I think of it as Leyden Street Hootenanny.

Who knows if I'll ever do anything with this.

Then I decided to commit to 4 or 5 studies of the same scene which is a hybrid of a few pictures I'd taken of marshes.  I think I'll call the series "Streaming."

4 of the 5 sketches

Then I made this underpainting for Day 8's painting.

Underpainting for Streaming #1

31 Days - Day 6

This is how I left it last night on Day 6. Got a class this afternoon, so getting these cleaned and back in the boxes is key.  From here on I'll end the classes 10 minutes early, and make the cleaning and putting away a lesson in hue and value...

And I did manage to get this one done.

"No Giant" 9x12 pastel on light gray Pastelmat

31 Days - Day 5

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I did have a disclaimer at the beginning of this project  that said, if there's not a finished painting at the end of the day, there would at least be a Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum coloring page or an underpainting.  That said, I have both.

Since it's getting cold, I am also getting ready to move my teaching operation back into the house - which means I need to clean and organize the boxes I use with the kids.  The last time I did it, my BFFitWWW (that's Best Friend in the Whole Wide World) Patsy Hamel helped me.  We took the entire New Year's weekend of 2012.

I must say, the kids have done a pretty good job over the past nearly 3+ years keeping the colors and values where they need to be, but not quite.  And they are so dirty.

So I took a screen and shop vac to the boxes.  They're still really dirty but not so much so.

But in the meantime, I knew I had to make a painting.  So, on Pastelmat light gray I started one.  

Oh, but wait.  Before that I made a coloring page for the Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum.  This counts as #5 of 31!

Here's the underpainting of the next work:

Pastelmat is so different than the supports I usually use.  It sucks the stuff in...

I vacuumed them out. Here's how far I got with the boxes:

Tomorrow, it's the organizing.  Sounds easy unless you have 100% color acuity.

By the end of the day, this will be tomorrow's painting.

"No Giant" Get it?

31 Days - Day 4

I loved how the light was hitting these poppies in front of a friend's house on Atlantic Street last summer so I took a bunch of pictures with my phone.

 #4 of 31 "Eye Popping"  9x9 pastel on light blue colourfix

And congratulations to current and past students of mine for getting ribbons in the Young at Art show at the Plymouth Center for the Arts.  Well done!

Olivia's

Sadie's

Scotty's

Lyla's

Sadie and me