June 11, 2022 — The palm tree painting began today. I call this day, “first paint”. A time when I establish my relationship with the painting, figure out the colors, and which brushstrokes will be most effective to translate the scene. Sometimes it takes some trial and error before the wind is at my back. Not sure if I have it figured out yet, I will look and adjust tomorrow. It doesn’t seem quite right. These scenes where the red of the sunset is infusing all the normal colors, making blue water a reddish purple, black rocks a red black, for example, can be difficult. 

I kind of regret I didn’t do a scene with lots of palm trees so they would each be smaller and more forgiving. This one is huge and every flaw will be noticeable. Plus a scene with multiple palms would’ve given me multiple practices painting them.

AC, something that should not be a dilemma in Redding

My God, I’m tired. I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open. I ran the AC last night (V is still visiting and it was SO HOT). We went to the lake after I got home from the studio and cooled off, but the house was 87 degrees inside, so I turned it on. Wow, it chugged all night long and still was chugging this morning to keep the house at 79. The weird thing is, I was actually so unused to it, that I was cold in bed and took forever to fall asleep. I kept getting up to lower the ceiling fan another notch as it was freezing me in combo with the AC, finally turning the fan completely off. I probably only got 5 hours of sleep needing to be fed, coiffed, and coffeed before Valdo’s class at 9.

So no AC going forward, it just can’t make headway against this heat. I can’t even imagine my bill if I ran it daily, I’m guessing $250 extra. Then I WOULD be a starving artist, lol. This way, I’m a smokin’ hot artist. Drop by, you’ll see!

So the palm tree painting began today. And look, it’s a beautiful sunset outside right now! Even a palm tree in the scene.

Be the first to see the new painting by signing up for my monthly newsletter.