Category: landscapes

Today is National Farmers Day: Celebrating with farm-themed art

Published on by kmgunnartLeave a comment

Apparently, October 12th is National Farmers Day, as well as still being Columbus Day. Up until this morning, I had never heard of this, but y’all can be assured it is now officially on my calendar! Ever since I was a small girl, I wanted to be a farmer. In addition to my attempts at gardening and mad tree-planting sprees, I also raise (working) dairy goats, rabbits, and chickens. What better way to celebrate my new favorite holiday than with farm-themed art?

Hayfield Art

So far, I’ve done two paintings featuring hayfields: my Sunset Over the Hayfield in oil pastel, and the watercolor sketch Make Hay While the Sun Shines. Since I live at the dead end of a dirt road in a very rural corner of a rural county, hayfields are a common sight whenever we drive anywhere. There is just something about a field full of hay bales that gives me a warm and happy feeling in the depths of my soul. Round or square, though round are definitely the locally preferred format, I love to see hay bales sitting in a sunny field.

in-progress photo of my oil pastel landscape Sunset Over the Hayfield
watercolor sketch Make Hay While the Sun Shines

Produce artwork (fruits and vegetables)

While our property came with two mature Asian pear trees, we’ve added to that list a LOT in the decade since moving in: lemons, limes, oranges, sweet kumquat, dwarf pomegranate, an olive tree, and this year added two grapefruit and two fig trees. I still want to plant a couple of Barbados cherry trees, some true date palms, Indian/silver date palms, and pindo (jelly) palm trees. My husband also started growing moringa trees from seed this summer. Even more interesting, we discovered someone at some point in time planted a pink dwarf banana tree in the back of our property – I looked it up and those are native to Asia. The wildlife got our bright pink bananas this year, but now we know it’s back there, so perhaps next year we’ll get to eat some.

All that preamble to explain why fruits and vegetables are high on my list of favorite things to draw and paint when I want to do up a traditional still life piece of art. I’ve even gone to the grocery for the sole purpose of getting picturesque produce to do a photo shoot the other year. (For the record, only half of those photos were in focus, which is why I am not a photographer.)

I intended to post all of the produce-themed still life drawings and paintings here … but that is quite a lot of artwork! Instead, I’ll direct you to the category page – click here for the fruit and veggie still life. Even if I can’t grow it this far south, I can still buy and paint it.

Livestock Artwork

This category I do more than I draw or paint. Y’all have been treated to photos and stories about my goats, but I’ve only shared one drawing of one goat so far. It’s on my list of subjects to feature more, along with the chickens and rabbits. I’ll be doing more of that over the dark season, because we browsed the selection of farm animal T-shirts on Amazon and I was NOT impressed with what is out there. The obvious solution to my creative mind is to make my own! I do have my produce-themed art on apparel over at my RedBubble shop. Stay tuned, because I’ll probably do a rabbit first.

drawing of our goat Prim in tinted charcoal
sketch in tinted charcoal of our big girl, Prim

Celebrating National Farmers Day with art

I’ll need to wrap this up, because the charcoal pencils are calling to me to get to today’s drawing session. If I had known prior to this morning, I could have had something to paint, but right now I am quite content with just posting here to the art blog for this year’s short-notice celebration.

Next year, though, I will be pulling out the stops! Happy National Farmers Day to everyone, and have an art-full day.

January Virtual Art Walk

Published on by kmgunnart7 Comments

Once again this month, a handful of us artists who blog our art have gotten together for a virtual art walk! While there are art walks scheduled for January down here in Florida, a lot of the country is just not feeling it due to normal January weather, so why not do the art walk idea online? We have a nice selection of virtual art booths to browse.

January virtual art walk preview image
January virtual art walk – a quick preview

Art walk virtual booth 1: Snowy Scenes for January

We’ll start this month’s art walk up north in snow country, where Jo Wortman of Siena Blue up in New York has posted a bit of a retrospective on her snow scenes. She does an overview of her snowy landscapes so far this winter, and compares them to paintings she did in 2022 and 2021. I can certainly see the difference, and like other commenters on her post, I think the watercolor painting where she worked from a reference photo she found on Unsplash – as opposed to following a tutorial – is her strongest in this category. It’s interesting to see how her earlier work hints at this.

snowy landscape of a stream in winter by Jo Wortman of Siena Blue
Jo Wortman’s snowy landscape in watercolor

Virtual art walk booth 2: Braving the cold weather

Jim Hughes lives in Minnesota, and that area gets COLD in the winter. That doesn’t seem to deter Jim in his quest to get a really good photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker. We have them down here as well, but they are definitely camera-shy. Jim unleashes his creativity to solve the challenge. He basically built a fake tree trunk and put a suet cake just inside it – close enough to his porch to get the photo he desired. Then he got up before sunrise enough mornings in a row until he was finally able to slip out onto his porch in subzero temperatures to get the shot. I think he nailed it.

close-up photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker by Jim Hughes
Jim Hughes’ detailed photo portrait of a pileated woodpecker

Art walk booth 3: Steve Heap takes us to Hawai’i

Next booth for our January virtual art walk is where Steve Heap of Backyard Image takes us to the Hawai’ian island of Kauai. I didn’t know this landscape existed until he posted about it, but apparently Waimea Canyon is called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. He starts his virtual tour at the ocean, and follows the canyon up to the mountain top. The part I find most interesting is his observation that like the Grand Canyon in Arizona (which he has also visited and photographed) he finds it difficult to capture the grandeur in most photos. Some clouds and a few rainbows helped him get good shots though!

a rainbow adds a splash of spectacular color to this photo of Waimea Canyon on Kauai in Hawaii
a rainbow in Waimea Canyon, called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific

Ben’s Angel: Painting and poem by Dorothy Berry-Lound

Hang on to your hats, folks. Dorothy Berry-Lound‘s virtual booth is a powerful one. She shows you the painting first, then tells the moving story behind the artwork. Then she finishes up with a poem to go with this powerful painting with a moving story … and wow. I don’t think very many people will be able to forget this one. I don’t want to drop spoilers, but when you click through, be prepared for this emotionally. This is about her last visit with a dying friend, Ben.

powerful painting Ben's Angel by Dorothy Berr-Lound
Ben’s Angel, painting by Dorothy Berry-Lound

Before you go

After browsing all these booths, I’d like to just remind you about my new idea for my email list: coloring pages drawn by me. It may seem frivolous after such a journey, but I like to say it’s the little things in life that end up mattering so much over time. I’ve decided to make the 15th of each month when I send out a new drawing y’all can print out and color, so tomorrow I will be figuring out the technical details to make this work. New email subscribers will get the current printable image once they confirm their email addresses. (Confirming your email address is an important anti-spam step that I require.)

I do hope everyone has enjoyed this month’s virtual art walk. Visit the other blogs, leave comments to let us know what you think and feel about the art, and sign up for an email list or five.

December Virtual Art Walk

Published on by kmgunnart10 Comments

This latest virtual art walk post was supposed to have been a “Feature Friday” post, but apparently I picked up an unwelcome microbial hitchhiker when I was up in town earlier this week. I spent Friday feeling worse and worse, but the good news is, it didn’t last long at all and I am back to my old self. That means it is time to grab a mug of afternoon coffee, apply fingers to keyboard, and type out my post for our December edition of the virtual art walks we’ve been doing the past couple months on our art blogs.

But first, an earworm. Typing out the opening paragraph immediately brought this song to mind:

December by Collective Soul
social media graphic for December virtual art walk
social media image for December virtual art walk

December mean winter

At least in the northern hemisphere. Folks in the southern hemisphere are opposite of us, but I have never traveled south of the equator, so for me it means winter. I grew up in the Midwest in the late 70s and through the 80s, so I saw my share of snow and even a couple blizzards. It may be pretty to look at, but the cold just does not do me any favors. However, on the visual side, Jim Hughes up in the great frozen north – er, Minneapolis – has posted up his black and white record of the battle between the ice and the water flowing beneath and even compares it to images by abstract artist Jackson Pollock. I am not as familiar with the abstract works, so will leave that comparison to those who are, but Jim’s photos do make intriguing visuals.

black and white photo of a partially frozen creek up in Minnesota
Jim Hughes’ photo of the partially-frozen creek

December is a time to look back

Being the last month of the calendar year, December is the logical time to reflect on the year as a whole. Steve Heap has been doing monthly recaps recently, and for this virtual art walk he looks back at his November sales, including one of his personal favorites involving the West Virginia University’s mountaineer statue edited into a photo of a particularly picturesque building on the other side of campus. In the comments, the puffin photo seems to be getting most of the admiration, but my personal pick us the Hawaiian canoe photo. Between the colors and the layout, I would be inclined to paint the Kauai canoe scene out of the group.

traditional red and yellow Hawaiian canoe up on the beach on Kauai
Kauai canoe up in beach at sunset

Jo over at Siena Blue is also doing a bit of looking back, this time spotlighting some of her watercolor and gouache (pronounced “gwash” or similar, for those of us who look at French spellings oddly). The bird painting is cute, and hard to believe that is so small – an artist trading card which is 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. The one that really turned out beautifully is her landscape in burnt sienna and “a shade of blue,” as she describes it. Personally, I’d like to know which shade of blue, but that is probably because I love the triad of blue, purple, and red/pink so much. Either way, the burnt sienna and blue are across from each other on the color wheel, and if you aren’t careful and those two colors blend too much, you will get a greyish-brown color artists call mud. To use complementary colors and have it work without the dreaded mud happening – especially in watercolor! – is the challenge that both keeps us coming back to the studio while saying some very “nsfw” words when it goes wrong.

watercolor landscape painting by Jo Wortman of Siena Blue
unnamed (?) landscape watercolor painting by Jo Wortman of Siena Blue

I also wrote a bit of a look-back post earlier this week, but hey – I had a good reason to do so! For those who missed it, I took first place in the watercolor category at the VA Creative Arts Festival for the second year in a row.

Looking back at trying something new

Sometimes, the December retrospective is all about looking back after trying something new, and new art walk participant Dorothy Berry-Lound’s post is a look back at a new art technique she was inspired to try after watching a YouTube video. (Funny how many of us can get so fired up after watching a short YT vid!) She describes how physical the new technique was for her, since she has fibromyalgia. Hubby has “fibromyalgia-like symptoms,” so I know what that looks like and the fact she decided to do a second painting using the new technique tells me exactly how pleased she is with her results.

abstract art by Dorothy Berry-Lound called Cat Scratch

I rarely “get” abstract art, but the art world is certainly large enough to encompass the entire spectrum from hyperrealism all the way to the most abstract of abstractions. The color combination is certainly pretty, and it definitely looks textured. I’ll also note that it does resemble a few of my practice watercolors that ended up with cat prints across them (phthalo green does NOT lift), but that is about as far as my more-literal mind will go in trying to interpret. Again, the fact she did a second painting using this physically-exhausting technique tells me she likes the end result.

Looking forward to 2023

I’ve already started getting emails this weekend warning that products ordered this far into December may not arrive in time for Christmas, so I suppose it is time to turn my sights to the new year. After New year’s Dat, there is my birthday, and it is the “big five-oh.” Yeah, I’ll be turning fifty, and Friday before the stomach bug jumped me in earnest, my mother-in-law cut my hair in a new style since my friend Keashia said I should try to style my hair like my new internet “face.”

One last December earworm

This one is for my Dad, and my Mom as well, since they probably will both wrinkle their noses at the one I posted at the beginning. Here is a bit of Frankie Valli for some December music.

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons December 1963 (Oh What a Night)
digital art Tomatoes and Peppers still life

Experimenting with Digital Art: Text-to-Image software

Published on by kmgunnart16 Comments

The other week, I saw a fellow artist post a link on Twitter about a site called NightCafe Studio where you enter in a text prompt and it generates an image (which a lot of people mistakenly called “artificial intelligence”). Curiosity finally got the better of me, so I followed the link and began to play around with the software as an experiment. You can see the portfolio of my experimenting here on my profile at NightCafe. I’ve spent almost two weeks playing with it now, which is to say I am stepping into the concept of digital art, at least on the text-to-image side of it. (It’s so much faster than drawing or painting, and right now I feel as though I have a hundred different things going.)

The good, the bad, and the “What the ****?”

The profile/portfolio I link to over on NightCafe only includes the stuff that turned out good. I started off with a simple enough prompt, “pink flower on dark green leaves” or something very similar. If you scroll down far enough you will see the result at the very bottom. I fiddled around with a couple other phrases, and deleted those results as I did not like them. I am saving all the flower ones for their own post, but then moved on to see what kind of results I could get for some classic still life subjects.

Modern style still life of red and yellow bell peppers and one cherry tomato on white plates with a blue tablecloth
Tomatoes and Peppers, digital art

Here is one that turned out nicely. I deleted probably half a dozen or more in my attempts to get a nice still life arrangement of tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and an onion – salsa still needing assembly. I figured it would be perfect to hang up at my favorite Mexican restaurant in town, especially since my Summer Jalapeno painting is there. Let’s just say the program is not good at doing an onion and totally ignored the prompt about garlic. So instead of a still life I could name “Salsa, Some Assembly Required,” I got red and yellow bell peppers and a single cherry tomato. It does look nice, although I will need to draw/paint what I actually wanted. I uploaded the digital piece to my Pixels shop and my RedBubble shop for accessories, apparel, and prints.

Classic still life subject seem to give the art generator fits. I have some truly wild examples of a big weak spot in the code – but I will save a few of those for the floral post since I was trying for an old masters’ style of fruit and flowers still life composition. I will mention the text-to-image program has some issues with what shape apples are supposed to be. It also doesn’t seem to realize that apples and pumpkins are affected by gravity like everything else.

A smashing success for text-to-image

On a whim, I decided to try a text prompt that would describe my very first pastel piece I did at the age of just seven. I have no idea if it still exists, but it has stayed in my mind all these years. The first result is still the best: here is Sunset Palms, with the Neo-Impressionist style filter applied to it.

Sunset Palms, two palm trees silhouetted against a brilliant sunset sky with simulated impasto
Sunset Palms, digital art

The software even generated simulated impasto that looks like it was applied with a palette knife. I was a little surprised to see a swathe of green in the sky, but I think it works. I put this into Microsoft Jigsaw to play with it as a jigsaw puzzle, and the colors are just fun. Art prints are at my Pixels shop (along with puzzles) and apparel and accessories are at my RedBubble shop. I can definitely see myself painting variations of this image, either in acrylic or oil paint, once I finally get a cat-free art studio where it can dry without being walked on by my cats.

The struggle for black cats

I decided I wanted to see what kind of Halloween imagery the software could generate for me, and began to enter various prompts and try different style filters. I wanted an image of a black cat’s face filling the frame, with lovely green eyes providing a stark contrast to the black fur. Instead, the program spat out this – and I have seen hairballs that look prettier.

ugly software glitch
I just call it “fugly”

Well, at least it got the green eyes part right. No matter how I tilt my head and squint at it, it just does not look like a cat as I know them. This is emphatically NOT in the public portfolio, because that would just be embarrassing. Or maybe I am just not modern enough in my art sensibilities. I kept trying with the text prompts.

Black Cat sitting, digital artwork created using text-to-image software
Black Cat Sitting, digital art

The title Black Cat Sitting is the text prompt I used, and in this specific case, the image it gave me was very nice! I love the soft focus feel to the light, and the cat sure enough looks like a real cat. When I saw this one, I began to think perhaps there is some hope for text-to-image software after all. Yeah, famous last words. Here is what the software thinks a black kitten ought to look like.

another disasterpiece from a simple prompt
a five-eyed kitten? What the ****?

Yikes. That is not public anywhere else but here on the blog. Seriously – does this have five or six eyes, and why would a supposed “artificial intelligence” think kittens look like that? I mean, I know Halloween is supposed to be all about scary imagery, but this is just so many levels of wrong. And that is about as polite as I can stand for this one. I could post a few jack o’lantern mishaps, but I think y’all get the general idea of just how spectacularly wrong the algorithm can be on some of these.

Text-to-image digital art of – ME!

One day last week, I had an “Ah-ha!” moment and decided to see what kind of software-generated digital image I could get from the text prompt describing me. Hold your laughter now. I started off with the text prompt “middle-aged woman with short blonde hair,” and ended up with this:

ugly image from what ought to be a straightforward text prompt
how I feel first thing in the morning

OK, now y’all can have a good laugh. Apparently, punctuation is important, and that hyphen in middle-aged must have messed the algorithm up good and proper. Granted, there are definitely mornings when I might feel like this, but I don’t usually look quite this rough (or so my husband says). So I tried “mature woman with short blond hair,” and the second time I got an image I am now using as my “face” here on the internet.

the internet me, from text-to-image digital art program

Now, she doesn’t look like she’s about to celebrate her 50th birthday like I am, but most of the female figures the software spits out look to be no older than 25, and most look like they could be movie stars, so an image that brings to mind Florence Henderson from The Brady Bunch probably fits the program’s parameters for mature. I like the simulated brushstrokes for it as well. Her eyes are the wrong color and she isn’t wearing glasses “thick enough to see into the future,” but she’ll be my face for the internet for now.

While the text-to-image programs used to generate digital art are far from perfect, every once in a while you get a good result. I can’t see it replacing us traditional artists any time soon, but for now it is an amusing novelty. I may just use it as a way to test composition ideas or to get inspiration. Mostly, I am just playing with it because it amuses me.

Sunset Over the Hayfield landscape in oil pastel

Published on by kmgunnart5 Comments

Y’all can probably tell from the title that this isn’t the third candle picture, but a hayfield landscape in oil pastel. Don’t worry – I can explain … that’s why I have a blog! So yesterday after posting in here in the morning, I picked up my 11 by 14 inch sketchbook, turned to a new page, and then gridded and sketched out my third candle picture. I had to at the very least mark off the boundaries to make it 10 by 14 inches, because that is the size of my watercolor block I plan to use and also because I had cropped the reference photo to a 5:7 aspect ratio because Microsoft’s photo editor does not have an 11 by 14 aspect ratio as an option. (Or, if it does, I have not yet found it.)

Switching from still life candles to a hayfield landscape

So, sketch completed (I am scanning it as I type right now) I picked up my 11 x 14 inch oil and acrylic paper pad and opened to the top page … and stopped, because there was a sketch already on it. I immediately recognized it, and remembered exactly which ref photo I used to sketch it, though I didn’t remember which medium I had originally planned to use to turn sketch into painting. Had I meant to use my oil paint? Acrylic paint? Or oil pastels? Whichever I intended back when I sketched it, I was in a definite oil pastel mood again yesterday, and I can point to Judith at Artistcoveries for that because she has been blogging her progress with the oilies as she clambers up the somewhat steep learning curve with an enthusiasm that reminds me of my decision to learn how to use these. (See her Zinnias post for a good example of the progress she is making.)

So I pulled out my oil pastel sets (yes, plural) and set up my painting tray once I determined the cats were napping and started in on it, because this is a piece I am still enthusiastic about making – as the post and artwork title suggest, it is a landscape featuring a sunset over a hayfield. I would probably have to do a whole series of meditations and journaling to figure out why I just love hayfields as an art subject, but right now my main concern is making them and analyzing later. Y’all may recall I painted a hayfield back in December in watercolor which also featured the large round bales. My mom’s comment was I had too much sky in it, but honestly there are definitely sunny cloudless days here in the flatlands of Florida where the sky feels huge, and that feeling was in my painting.

Is this enough background for a simple landscape?

The good news is I remembered to snap a couple photos for some in-progress pictures. The even better news is they turned out pretty good for me and my cheap old digicam! The main problem I had was positioning myself to avoid casting a shadow on it. This is after the first layer, using my big Mungyo Gallery (standard) set which is just above the the sketchpad on my old-fashioned TV tray I use for painting at my computer desk.

first layer of Mungyo Gallery standard oil pastel for my landscape Sunset Over the Hayfield
in-progress picture of Sunset Over the Hayfield and my big set of oil pastels I like to use for the first layer

After blending in the first layer using cheap cotton swabs, it was time to switch to the softer oil pastel sets, the Mungyo Gallery Artists’ series and the Erengi Art Aspirer, which has colors Mungyo doesn’t. These aren’t as soft as the Sennelier brand, which isn’t exactly a bad thing down here in Florida. I have a small set of six Sennelier, and am hestitant to try to take them outdoors during the summer for fear of them just straight-up melting like ice cream. (For the record, spellcheck hates all of these brand names.) After a while of making marks, blending, and then layering over, it was time to lay the first layer of ModPodge, which I did right before joining hubby outside to feed and put up our various critters. When I came back in, the ModPodge still wasn’t fully dry, which is normal on a day with better than 20% chance of rain.

This morning while working on my second mug of coffee, I scanned the finished and dried oil pastel landscape, then laid down a second coat to make sure I didn’t miss any spots or have too-thin areas where I built up my layers of oil pastel. Here it is, in all its very colorful glory:

Sunset Over the Hayfield, 11 x 14 inch landscape in oil pastel
Sunset Over the Hayfield, 11 by 14 inch oil pastel on primed paper, sealed, original available $140 USD

Links to purchase Sunset Over the Hayfield landscape in oil pastel

I’ve uploaded the original for sale at Daily PaintWorks, and of course if you are local to me you can buy it in person (just contact me and we can make arrangements) while if you are out of the area there is a shipping option on DPW. Prints and puzzles are available at my Pixels store. Finally, I have uploaded it to RedBubble so you can get it printed on all kinds of accessories and swag – they have even added pet mats and blankets.

So, about that third candle painting? Since I still have not decided if I want to paint it in watercolor or oil pastels, I think I will do both. I’ll also try to remember to take more in-progress snapshots, and will group the sketch scan with the finished pieces. If I can maintain this level of motivation, I may even have it done in a day or two! Wish me luck.