Beach Girl

This beautiful child was named, in part, after Grayton Beach, FL. She is shown there in this recent portrait. Portraits continue to be the most challenging subject for me to paint. They combine my love of painting people with my background of painting commissioned subjects. This one is 24x30...makes me want to head for the coast!

AP Night

Four AP art students from local schools joined us in the drawing class tonight...it was a great crowd...glad they were there. Laura H did an outstanding job posing...bright yellow, flowing costume. Some nice drawings were the result. The reclining pose shown is one of those poses dancers will take sometime that most ordinary humans couldn't manage to get into much less get out of. They can be challenging to draw as they don't follow normal proportions and if you're not careful, it might look like you've really lost all ability to draw the figure. I'm glad to say, after the 15 minute pose was over, she had no trouble moving on to the next pose.

Twinkle Twinkle

Emily T in a "sparkly" blue dress and pointe shoes. Very nice poses. This one may turn into a painting later on. The sparkles cover the dress and did not lend themselves to a 15 minute conte sketch but should be fun to experiment with in paint.

They Blew Up Yuchitown

Years ago, I did a painting of a prehistoric Creek Indian village called Yuchitown. The site is located near Columbus, GA. Recently, I was asked if I would allow a copy of the painting to be part of a permanent display at the Atlanta Airport(Hartsfield). "A Walk Through Atlanta History" is located between concourses C and D. You'll have to skip the train and walk it but you'll get a little exercise and maybe learn something along the way. Many of my paintings for the National Park Service find other uses beyond their original purpose. Some have ended up in textbooks while others are displayed in museums to show general themes in history. In this case, they cropped it at the top and bottom and blew it up to what appears to be 10-12 feet. I have not been able to go see it yet as it is in an area that is not accessible by any one that is not flying. The close up photo was taken by my daughter recently.

Love

This painting started out as a larger horizontal painting a couple of years ago. It showed a dancer in a small meadow or field near a live oak tree. The dancer was off center to the left. After working on it for quite some time, I finally decided to crop the tree out and darken the background. I always liked the figure but just could not get the background to work. I finished it today, Valentines Day and titled the work, "Love". 18x24. Model is Robin V.

New Scale

Depending on where you look, Kong was somewhere between 25' to 150' tall. 25-50 seems to be the most common. I like the idea of a 20-25 foot beast. That's still pretty gigantic but maybe a little more believable?? Here's a photoshopped version of the first sketch with a larger Kong.

Frazetta's Kong

One of my early influences and a continual source of inspiration, Frank Frazetta was deeply influenced by the original King Kong movie. If you've seen the movie, you can see it in his paintings. This is one of several of his versions of the story in paint. I love the atmosphere in this and my go for something similar in my final version.