Azalea

While I was looking around for something to paint that required glazing, I found that if I painted a floral that's almost around the corner for blooming...that'd be a good thing.  Our azaleas here in East Texas rival those of further south and east and are always the first big show of spring.  My thing isn't really in the glazing department...so I thought I'd try some here.  My usual way to paint is to charge in and just let the paints merge.  I'm not so sure I even like this glazing stuff...maybe I need to do a bit more before making that decision.  This one is quarter sheet and I painted it large enough to be able to do the glazing.  I find that painting small doesn't give me enough room to do much and probably would have had more fun had this been half sheet.

Cindi

This is my friend, Cindi DeWeese, from California.  Last summer after our Florida get together with our PaintingFriends group, she and I decided to take a "Thelma & Louise" road trip for a few days to New Orleans on the way home.  What a fun town...Bourbon Street, the French Quarter, casinos, jazz and clubs, great food, just a fabulous few days of wonderful things to do.  On one of our little shopping excursions she found this darling crochetted hat...and while having a bit of food and "drink"  somewhere in the FrenchQuarter the photo op with these sun spots bathing her face was just too good to pass up for a painting.  Portraits aren't my strong suit, but this one was really lots of fun...

A Fireside Chat With Jane Freeman

My dear friend, Jane Freeman, got cornered into doing an interview with me for a forum that I'm on...Painting Friends...and it is up and ready for reading.  Hope you'll drop by www.paintingfriends.com  and take a look.  Just go to the site, sign in as a guest, and enjoy.  We met year before last when the Artcolony gang met for a face-to-face in Chicago, and I could still see her smiling eyes and hear her voice when we were "chatting" so it was lots of fun for me.  There are a handful of her paintings included, and some pretty good information and bantering back and forth if I do say so.  Janie's book, "A Celebration of Light" was one of the very first art instruction books that I purchased as a rank beginner.  I saw this gorgeous painting on the cover, and that was all there was to that.  It's amazing that from that painting and book a pretty special friendship has happened.  I think it's somewhat of a miracle that I so admired the book and her talents, then found her blog(Artcolony) and became a real fan of Jane and the other very talented artists there, then by some still unexplained event was asked to join the blog, and have become friends with the author of the book that started it all...go figure.  Our art world is a rather small world in the scheme of things...and aren't we all lucky. 

So, hope you'll go and take a look...you'll love her thoughts and wonderful advice.  This landscape is one of her latest paintings...and we're all drooling over the others.

One of our friends just e-mailed me for more instructions...so...click on "What's New" and scroll down to the chat, or click on "Quick Links", then click on "Today's Posts" and scroll.