Thre is a huge buzz about Twitter these days, Color Fields and WIP continue

5x7 inches
acrylic on Masonite panel

I'm back to the "Color Fields" series today. The thing I really love about working on a series in small format is the immediacy of the paintings. Doing them in one setting is fun. This isn't like the plein air alla prima work. I don't feel the pressure in the studio, it's just different and I'm not entirely sure why. I think it is because I have clearly set in my mind that this is study time. I have no aspirations that the paintings will be anything but a learning experience and so there is no pressure.

Today's palette was a bit different than the last several. I added a cad yellow light and an alizarin to the palette I have been using. The greens are cooler than they have been over the last few months. I like playing around a bit with this palette for studies. I am constantly battling with yellows on my palette. I am thinking that I might add cad yellow light to both oil and acrylic palettes for the summer months. I think lemon is sooo cool, that I want something a bit warmer but not as warm as the ochres and cad medium. I'll do a chart soon to think about that possibility. I liked the cad yellow light today. Cooler but not too cool. More manageable than the lemon yellow. These Color Fields paintings are just terrific for brushwork study. Still using the paint by number approach for them with no mixing or blending on the painting.




Stage two of the WIP, Playing around a bit with the palms and the grasses, still very rough. A long way to go but I like to play around with these larger format paintings, letting them develop the way they want to. Using lots of red oxide, cad orange, and alizarin in this painting.

Social Networks

I have used a few social networks over the last 3 or 4 years. Frankly, I've not been impressed with any of them until I found Twitter. It is suited so nicely for me. Quick and clean, easy to read posts and a good marketing potential to get the word out to people who have a commonality with you and your interests. At first I didn't get it. It seemed silly and extremely limited. I thought it was fun and random. I followed all of my artist friends and that was it. I soon found twitter search and began to search for people who had the same interests, the same passions for subjects that I do, like Florida Nature, French Bulldogs, the beach, the coast,cooking and so forth.

The longer I stayed on Twitter, the more fun little ways I found to use it. There is a gizmo which allows you to automatically feed your blogs to your twitter friends, a Twitter gizmo which works like google search, which will send you an email once a day with various key phrases or topics of interest to you. There are Twitter groups, and I could go on but go see for yourself. If you read the posts each day, there will be people posting the links to all of these great little Twitter gizmos.

It is very easy to become addicted to Twitter and waste a lot of time there. I try to be businesslike about it, posting marketing stuff, art stuff and blog stuff for my followers. I try to make my posts at least interesting and avoid the "I'm drinking coffee" kinds of inane statements. I have learned a lot about business and marketing on Twitter and enjoy all of the cool links people send out each day.

Twitter has sent me a lot of lookers at my blogs, and my web site, which is always a good thing. If you use it wisely as good tool, it is wonderful, and if you just want to have some fun, it's great for that too. HERE You can follow me on twitter. My name there is blondheim12

Today's Recipe

Cream Biscuits

2 cups self rising flour
1 T sugar
1 8 oz carton heavy whipping cream

Mix it all up and roll in wax paper. Cut and bake like regular biscuits at 425 degrees.