Lobster on the loose

My latest painting I started over the weekend - I did the sketch Sunday night while watching Desperate housewives; used colored pencil to flesh things out...

Monday afternoon I painting with friends and got a lot done. I thought I was about 60% through the piece when my painting buddies yelled "STOP!"

This is a blurry iPhone photo but the painting is very loose at the moment and most areas have been blocked in without additional attention. The lobster claw in front has the most paint which seems appropriate. I'll take my friends' advice and leave the work alone for a few days. I think there are a few place where I need to pay more attention to colors and dark/shadow but I'll try hard to resist the urge to 'finish' the messy bits... lol...

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A Crabby Saturday

After 6 hours of color mixing in our color theory class Friday, I was ready to cut loose and have some fun today!

We got together at Jean's house for a few hours of painting and goofing off this morning. We each had an interesting subject but some were more than challenging than others. Jean was busy exploring the effect of glazes on a large landscape painting while Raffy started a new red / green composition of fall leaves.  My subject was by far the most fun!

14x18 acrylic on canvas - title?

I think the crab has decided my beach ball is a potential mate - Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it back...

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Having fun with a landscape painting

I have a great collection of photos from our travels abroad over the last 20 years. Lots of landmark buildings, scenery, and bridges. I want to try my hand at painting some of them but I'm not much for boring landscapes and most landmarks are a mixture of browns and grays, also boring.

I've seen artists jazz up images with bright colors and perspective changes so I thought I'd give that approach a try. My first victim? London's Tower Bridge...

Pretty impressive landmark but for me it's not that inspiring as a subject to paint. The first thing I did when sketching the bridge on to my canvas was to warp things a little bit. After that I applied a light  under-painting for the background and water.

At this point, the painting is starting to get a little more interesting. I thought about colors for a while and settled on warm tones.

I finished things off with some india ink to highlight the edges and I resisted painting a knight bungee jumping from the closest tower. I have not varnished the piece yet so the bungee jumper is not out of the question yet...

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Sock puppets deserve better...

I painted a picture of some sock puppets last year and while I liked the characters, the piece did not quite hit the mark. The title was "Sock Puppet Undressed" and I liked the idea but the picture was flat and uninspiring. The purple guy on the right also bothered me so I was determined to paint him out of the new picture.


I started thinking about WHY the hand would be undressed and decided 'laundry day' was a good explanation. I placed the characters at the Laundromat in front of a pile of clothes and machines. Not only are there dirty sock puppets inthe pile, there are also sock puppets tumbling in the dryer!

"Laundry Day" 12 x 36 inches acrylic

I'll leave the painting alone for a day and then go back and add a few touch ups and highlights. I'm much happier with this version, how about you?

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All in one Place

I've been toying with the idea for a web site for at least a year but it's always been on the back burner. The other day someone asked me where they could find my work online and I started listing all of the places I have one or more originals or prints for display or sale: This blog, ETSY, ArtFire, Imagekind, FineArtAmerica, CafePress, Zazzle, etc., etc., and I'm sure I forgot a few. If you browse the sidebar of my blog you'll probably see them all.

That got me thinking that I really need one central landing place for my stuff and some branding to make it easy to identify and remember. I picked up a domain name and headed over to Weebly to build a simple web site. Weebly is a great site because it is FREE, it has simple design tools and allows you to embed more complicated multimedia elements if you have the skills and tools to do it. It fits my needs perfectly.

www.ArtbyRobinW.com is born...



It's a simple design with links to my gallery, this blog, and retail sites where I've separated art work from the critter coasters and other ornaments by creating a new ETSY shop. Nothinglikeit is still out there of course.

I'm busy adding images for the original art work I have for sale and uploading high quality images to FineArtAmerica for prints. Now I need to get busy creating more pieces for my gallery and my online shops!

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Art Shows and Fine Art America

We had a great art show and sale over the holiday weekend. Wonderful weather and quite a few sales!

Many of the paintings I did not sell are back at Scavengers. I'm going to upload copies of a few of the paintings to FineArt America to see if that will generate some print sales. Here's a sample of a link with one of my paintings called "Patritic Pup"... flag art

Wish me luck!

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