January Newsletter

Happy New Year, and welcome to my new site! I’m hoping to post a newsletter at the end of each month with site updates, life updates, and studio updates. Update city. Here we go!

This last month has been a whirlwind of constant colds (thank you toddler), unprecedented southern California rain, painting, and ‘spring’ cleaning. After the joyful clutter and chaos of the holidays, I always feel an intense urge to purge our un-used and unnecessary things. We still have a ways to go, but we’ve made some nice progress.

It’s our first January living in our new house, which makes it all the more exciting to get organized and maximize our space. My biggest goal for this winter is to find a good semi-permanent spot for my studio space. It’s a good thing I love a design challenge…

And on the topic of painting, I only took on one commission in January. If you missed it, I did one small portrait per day in December, and was really ready for a painting break. But now that it’s been a month, I’m hoping to get back into the painting swing of things. Turns out I actually enjoyed the intense pressure to paint daily! Below is the commission I worked on. These two handsome gentlemen are Kahuna and Yeti, and I had as much fun painting them as they’re having in this photo. I’m starting to add more texture in the finishing stages of portraits and I love the life it gives to the painting.

For the month of February, I’m really excited to spend a bit more time working on originals. My plans are to practice drawing the human head as much as possible, and to get at least one original landscape finished. I always find the beginning part of learning a new skill the most challenging…I tend to get frustrated very quickly if I’m not mastering something fast enough and just give up on it - but I’m determined to push through that and master drawing people! Stay tuned, and I hope to see you here next month!