I have not taken very many commissions in this very busy year, but here is one that I have recently finished and can share with you now that it has been delivered to the client. A watercolor portrait of a family home, framed by snow in the owner’s favorite way.… Read More »Portrait of a Home Commission
Our neighbors are moving and sold us two solid-pine bookshelves for the dining room. This room has always echoed, and the addition of some new many-sided furniture has helped tremendously. The plan was to paint the shelves white to match the baseboards, so last weekend as temperatures warmed up I… Read More »Painting Bookshelves
We got a small tease of spring before plunging back into below-freezing highs, prompting me to paint another wish for warmer weather. This tiny watercolor was supposed to be less of a burden to finish in it’s diminutive format; a relaxing way to pass time with my hands I won’t… Read More »Sunset Sail
The snowpack was late this year, but once it arrived, it grew quickly. Still trying to get outside as much as possible, there were a few days when extreme cold kept me confined to the house to an even greater degree than the rest of the pandemic has. Embracing my… Read More »Heavy Snowfall, A Winter Landscape in Watercolor
Thank you for rejoining me in 2021 after my short New Year’s hiatus from blogging. After posting every single week of 2020, I thought I deserved a little time off to recharge and set some new goals. I’m heading into 2021 with loads of painting goals, but gentle ones. To… Read More »Endurance, a Winter Landscape
When we last left off, I had just put down my darkest values and finished the sky and mountains. Continuing to work primarily back-to-foreground, top-to-bottom, I’ve begun building up the tower and filling in the grasses with many overlapping short strokes. It took a long time to build up the… Read More »Commissioned Landscape in Progress, Complete
I’ve had to keep this one under wraps until I know the gift has been given. Today, I’d like to show you some in-progress shots of this commissioned landscape. We’ll talk about process, and next week I’ll reveal the finished painting, long since delivered to its intended recipient. The process… Read More »Work in Progress Commissioned Landscape
Our country is a dumpster fire, but I’m still trying to make things, paint, and occasionally recognize each moment as a transient reality independent of cyberspace’s hellscape. The ideas, emotions, and socioeconomic motivators behind the unfolding political revolution (or collapse) is interesting and important, but it is also only a… Read More »Green Canyon
After months deciding what color we wanted the front door to be forever, we settled on the best, safest, darkest choice: black. I ordered myself a jar of Art Deco exterior metal door paint and waited for a dry 65 degree day when we would be home all day (oh,… Read More »Finally Painted The Front Door
It’s almost time to say goodbye to winter. What a kind and brief winter it’s been. I know that the unseasonably warm temperatures are a symptom of of our dying planet, and will bring increased disease-bearing insects to our summertime, however this warm and relatively snow-free season of darkness was… Read More »The Thaw: Late Winter Landscape
This is Zeke, Lord of Darkness and proof of concept for animals-as-dark-sorcerers portraiture. I feel a regal portrait is an appropriate thing to post for President’s Day…compositionally speaking. Zeke is a mischievous and smart good boy, with a face so much resembling a hell-hound that I was compelled to depict… Read More »Zeke, Lord of Darkness
Sometimes it’s really hard to decide what to make next. I am officially running out of room for my creations, a common curse amongst the maker class. But because of this lack of space, there is an implied demand that anything made should be made well, and better yet for… Read More »Inside My Sketchbook, Inside My Manic Head
I have practiced a ‘no shit, genius’ technique using gel medium and liquid acrylics. Simply spoon some gel medium onto a horizontal canvas and dribble strategically liquid acrylics, and dabs of solid acrylics as well, why not. Using a pallet knife, move the medium over the pigment and across the… Read More »Gel Medium Technique
Finally, I’m calling them finished. The large pair of abstract, moody landscapes that I’ve been working on since the start of the new year are done and hung. Not that I have put an excessive number of hours into them, but I have to tell myself that they’re finished more… Read More »Dining Room Diptych. Abstract Landscape in Acrylic.
When planning a large painting, it is wise to map out color, form, and composition on a small scale first. Thumbnail drawings and color studies help an artist explore different images for the same visual problem quickly, and make executing the final piece much faster. I have settled on the… Read More »Color Studies for Large Dining Diptych
We have transformed our master bath with paint and a medicine cabinet. It only took *checks notes* two years to get this room finished*, but the day has come. Below is a photo of the before. Plain white walls, not enough storage. Lucky for us, the fixtures that came with… Read More »Master Bath Makeover
Abstract art has it’s place in home decor. Representational work is my bread-and-butter, and how I’ve worked exclusively my entire career. The art I make is either utilitarian, or representational. Usually it’s both. But there are spaces in the home that don’t need the specificity of realism. For these spaces,… Read More »Desedimentation (My First Abstract Painting)
My mom wanted some new paintings to go with her freshly painted bathroom walls. Formerly, she displayed two green wooden panels with dreary flowers painted on them. She asked me to update the panels with some new flowers on a white background. My mom likes purple (the living room carpet… Read More »Rustic Flower Paintings
I’m trying to decide what color to paint the front door. It’s a beige house with white trim and black porch fixtures. I’ve quickly photo-shopped my ideas onto the house, but because the porch is in shadow, it’s not an easy thing to picture. I know that black would look… Read More »What Color Should I Paint the Front Door?
Happy Saturnalia! Bright Solstice! Merry Yule! It’s a very busy time of year for me, as always, so I haven’t had much time to post. I was doing so well there for a while! By now this painting has been published, so it’s safe for me to share. Above is a… Read More »Holiday Commission of the Boston Skyline
In the middle of July we took an absolutely lovely vacation to the heart of the Adirondack park to a private Island in the middle of Long Lake, in up-state NY. The Island is called ‘Round Island’ and it’s owned by the family of some of our closest friends. They… Read More »En Plein Air at Round Island
Happy Summer everyone! This post has nothing to do with summertime, but I hope everyone had a wonderful solstice nonetheless. This post is kind of the opposite of summer; it’s another skull painting that I finished last winter, but I was waiting to get it framed before I published a… Read More »Canadian Lynx Skull Watercolor
Arriving home after a half-day hike in the woods I attempted to recreate one of the beautiful landscapes that I came across by memory. Though the image seemed vivid in my mind, it is never preferred to recall an image by memory alone. Memory isn’t a reliable visual resource; most… Read More »Tiny Landscape From Memory
Another skull painting to add to the series I’ve been working on: a bison. This is the first full-size watercolor that I’ve completed in the new house, though the sketch and reference photos began last year before the move. Very straight-forward, I start with a pencil sketch transferred onto a watercolor… Read More »Bison Skull Watercolor
Goodness, I’ve been so busy lately with absolutely no time to post because we just bought a house!!! Finally, the process is done, and the house is ours. We’ve been trying to close on this thing for the better part of a season, but as anyone who’s ever bought a… Read More »Get Ready for the DIY Home Improvement Posts
I finished another painting! And it’s another animal skull! It is a 12×16″ inch original watercolor painting of a giant pheasant skull. Matted to 11×14″ and framed to 14×18″. The frame is much more beautiful in person. My iPhone does not do the image justice photographing through the glass, but you… Read More »Really into Skulls
I am thrilled to finally be able to share this painting with you. I finished it some time ago but just presented it to the client this weekend. Commissioned by the Army Mountain Warfare school in Jericho, VT, this large watercolor painting combines the school’s mascot (a Ram’s head) with… Read More »Large Watercolor Commission
Merry Christmas! Below is the painting that I made for my aunt’s annual Christmas card. It is a portrait of two new family dogs. I painted this piece in quite a hurry using watercolors and colored pencils. It is impossible to get a photograph of two dogs looking in the… Read More »Commissioned Christmas Card: Watercolor, Colored Pencil
The other night I finished a painting of a leafy sea dragon. I saw one of these beautiful fish a week or so ago on TV and decided that it would be a really fun thing to paint. I hunted down a couple of different reference pictures online, and from… Read More »The Leafy Sea Dragon
Here’s a little painting that I did a while back but haven’t had a chance to talk about. This is my Blue Chameleon; he is done in watercolors on cold press paper, and took about three hours to paint. He is currently in a cute little green frame along side… Read More »Blue Chameleon
After spending Spring break 2012 in Sicily as part of a travel & art class at University of Hartford, I came back to the United States ready to make artwork about what struck me most during my time abroad. I am extremely proud of these three paintings. They can be… Read More »Series of Sicily
Yesterday I attended a pointe class at ‘The Studio, A Dance Center for Adults’ in Brookline, MA. A friend of mine takes classes there, and she was able to arrange for me to come into a class with my camera to get some reference for a possible future body of… Read More »A Fly on the Wall: The Ballet Edition
Last painting done for my senior thesis! This one is of two modern dancers whom I photographed at the University of Hartford Hartt School. They were a joy to photograph, and provided my camera with all sorts of elegant and gravity defying shots. I chose to paint this particular pose… Read More »Modern Dancers
Part of my senior thesis project was to do a series of three. I chose to do a series of three portraits, of three women, in three different modes of costume, interacting with three different classifications of animals. The first portrait is of a woman in a tradition costume. A… Read More »Portraiture
Right now I am sitting in my studio taking a short break from painting. The semester is coming to an end but because of all of the interruptions to my work and the work of my classmates, we all have a lot of of work to get done by the… Read More »Exactly two weeks until the semester ends!
Today I’ve added two new paintings to the Illustration gallery. This set of two was designed for my advertising illustration class to appear on bottles of wine. Our assignment was to come up with two different wine labels, done in a comparable style, that features two different animals: one for… Read More »Paintings for Wine Labels: The Walrus and Penguin
Here is the first assignment from my oil painting class. Our task was to define an alter-ego for ourselves, and to paint our likeness on this fantasy identity. I decided that my alter-ego would be an exotic snake charmer, hiding from the dessert sun in her lavish arabian, or maybe… Read More »Alter-ego: The Snake Charmer
Last painting of the year from my Acrylics illustration class! I decided to take a more stylized route for this assignment, which was to include a turtle. It was an extremely open assignment, really. It could have to do with anything we wanted as long as there was a turtle… Read More »Turtle Rock
I really like how this Illustration came out. I knew that I wanted to paint sushi, but if I was going to spend fifty hours on a painting, it needed to be something really interesting and befitting of my unique sense of humor. So I just went for it. I… Read More »Fish People
Here is the finished painting of my first project done in acrylic inks. I know I already posted the second one, but I had to wait for my professor to hand this one back before I could scan it. The assignment was to paint a part of my head as… Read More »Grape Hair
I completed this painting a few weeks ago, but didn’t post it on the web because it was a SURPRISE for my friend. You may have seen the black and white practice version posted here not long ago, but now, here is the totally separate color painting. This is the… Read More »Portrait of a Friend
Just completed a commission for a repeat client. It’s a drawing of a house, with a few light washes of watercolor over it. This painting was quick and inexpensive. If anyone needs a painting of a house, I would definitely take a commission like this again.
I have a thing for dark humor. The painting below is my final watercolor piece of the fall semester, 2010. Our assignment was to do a painting where the main subject matter is an egg. That was the only requirement; other than containing an egg, the painting could be about… Read More »Eggs, Anyone?
Here is my first watercolor from this semester. I did not post it sooner because I was waiting to get it back from my professor so that I could scan it. Then winter break came along and I had all of this other work to post, and so this painting… Read More »Fruit Mice
Watercolor is getting easier. I guess it just takes a lot of practice. There are many different techniques to learn and try before you can decide which one works best for you. Because watercolors are translucent, you can either build up your colors, mixing them on the paper, or you… Read More »Learning to use watercolors.
New painting! This one is a commissioned piece. Its a portrait done from an old photograph. I restored the colors and worked in washes at first to build up an underpainting, and then went in with my final colors and strokes. The face took me a very long time to… Read More »Portrait on the Grass
In my science and art class we have been learning about different kinds of paint: how to make them and how to use them. I’ve only ever painted with watercolors and acrylics, so it was my first time using fresco, egg tempera, and oil paints. Egg tempera is traditionally a… Read More »First Egg Tempera