Cowgirl

I had taken last night’s post down on second thought, but I will repost this painting, as a friend who was up late also last night saw it and asked about it. This is not the way I want to paint – very tight and within the box. (My Scenic Artist roots tugging at me again …) but the thought process is interesting so here goes.

I love painting people but have trouble finding people to paint (maybe because I never leave the ranch!), so I got excited about painting “portraits” of some of our stuff! We have a lot of old toys and memorabilia and I thought this was a great solution to that dilemma.

This has been an eye opener for me though as I’m seeing it’s not going to be so easy. All these toys look like toys, look like cartoons, so to do a serious painting of them is proving to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This is very interesting.

So far, I’ve done three paintings of toys. One is going in the bonfire pit. I’m not sure about the second one yet. This is the one I like the best, just an 8×10 of this cowgirl toy, but it’s much tighter than I want to paint anymore. It just seemed necessary to do that so it wouldn’t look so much like – “a toy”…? Hummm.

When I have more time I’m going to come back to this idea. I had built a still-life box where I can control the lighting, but I think I need to take “my toys” outdoors and put them in settings with natural light and a real environment. I’ll let you know how this progresses.