art post: New Year paintings

For several years, one of my family’s Christmas vacation traditions has been painting. Not everyone participates every year, but new paintings always get made. I typically end up doing my painting on New Years Eve or New Years Day.

Crooked Ukelele, 2006
I should have laid down the strings — or at least one of them — before I painted the bottom tension bar of the ukelele. Then it might not look quite so warped.

Fezant, 2010
During 2010, my parents frequently observed a wild pheasant on the grounds of their church building. They took lots of pictures of him, but I never got to see him myself. That year, my brother made fezes for me and BTH for Christmas. I couldn’t resist the punniness of a Pheasant in a Fez! The background is several layers of spattering done over snowflake stencils cut using TTT’s Snowflake Seeds method.

Moose in Cattails, 2007
I painted this picture over a canvas that was pre-printed with lineart of fairies flying around among sunflowers. As I thought about what to paint, the fairies in sunflowers morphed into dragonflies in cattails. Then I decided that it needed a moose. By the time the moose was done, I realized that I didn’t have a brush delicate enough to paint appropriately scaled dragonflies, so I left them out. I’m still ridiculously well-pleased with how it turned out.

Catnap, 2011
My five year-old nephew had poured out enormous pools of yellow and two shades of blue, so I decided to use those to make a portrait of my sister’s marmalade tabby as he lay napping in a shaft of sunlight. With a dark green backround, the result is quite delighfully pop-art-ish.

In His Own World, 2009
At the time that I painted this portrait of BTH, I wasn’t sure whether the trees and sky represented the real world that he was ignoring by playing a game, or the game world that he was immersed in in his mind. I’m still not quite sure which it is, and I rather like that ambiguity of meaning.

~*~*~
So, Mists is due on 25 September? I predict, therefore, that Patch 5.0 will be on 4 September because the pre-patch is usually two or three weeks before the launch of the expansion proper and 11 September would be a TERRIBLE day for the Horde to begin its attack on Theramore. That gives me about a month to finish up the Theramore quests with the alt who has been living there ever since late Wrath….