Another Parable

This one took me FOREVER to paint!  Outlining all those coins was pretty doggone tedious.  However, I had delightful surroundings to paint in.  Much more so than usual.  When I'm painting these I'm generally alone in our big church sanctuary.  People come and go.  There's a day-care that uses the building, so at least twice a day there's a line of small children that parades through and they all "ooh" and "aah".  They think I'm the BEST PAINTER IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!  Makes me smile every time.

But for this canvas, I was finishing up while our church's worship team was practicing.  It's definitely a rich experience to paint to live music, loud, filling the space, and I could sing along and nobody could hear me!

Funny thing, though.  The sound-man forgot I was there and was trying to give the worship team a better atmosphere so he turned down all the lights!   hahahah!  It's a little difficult to paint in the dark, Scotty!

More Parables

I did this sketch today.  It was great fun!  I wanted to do the lost sheep from a more modern perspective, but finding an image of a shepherd carrying a sheep over his shoulders took FOREVER.  There are about a bajillion  paintings of it, but I can't copy someone else's painting!  (my spell check is telling me that I spelled 'else's' wrong....that's puzzling me.)  I finally found one image, and then the shepherd was...um...a touch portly.  I really wanted an in-shape shepherd, for some reason.  So I had my hubby pose in the appropriate stance.  It worked!  I definitely have to "poof" the sheep when it comes time to paint, but this works from a sketch-point-of-view. Can't wait to paint this one!

On another note, I forgot to post pics of the first two canvases I painted in this set.  You've seen the sketches, here are the finished products:

What else have I been working on?

So, here are two more finished canvases!  I think I'm happy with the skin tone on both of these.  It was tricky though, especially since I'm using house paint.  I have cans and cans of not-true reds, and sickly yellows, and mixing those makes for some strange peaches!

These took me four solid days.  Nothing else got done.  My hubby cooked (or we ate out), the laundry piled up, my flowers almost died from neglect, and the bills got ignored.  Murphy was at Camp all week, so I could focus, focus, focus.

Four more to go!

Two More Parable Sketches

These are the latest sketches for the set of parable paintings I'm doing for my church.  I haven't the least idea what to do for the backgrounds.  Clearly I'll have to decide that before the deadline!  And my markers make skin-tone very difficult to nail down.  Clearly I'll have to decide what to do with that, as well!

The first one is the parable of the persistent widow...you know, the one who kind-of nagged the unrighteous judge until he finally gave her what she wanted.   Then Jesus compares our Heavenly Father's care for us, and how He gives us good things.  The idea is that we need to persevere in prayer.

The second is the parable of the talents.  I kept changing my mind about this one.  I even had the reference shots all done and ready to go, but at the last minute I didn't like them.  So I had to go scrounging.  These are loose interpretations of three different pics of family members.  I thought I had altered them enough, and then my nephew recognized his grandmother!  Oops!  Sorry mom!  Did you ever wonder how you would look blonde?  I'm still not sure about this one.  Does it communicate?  Does the man to the right look sheepish over his lack of wise use of his talent?  Do the other two look like they're rejoicing (which would be reasonable), or gloating (which would be bad!)?  Who knows...I may change this one again.

There you have it.  My angst!

What else have I been working on?

These are the preliminary sketches for the next canvases at my church.  The final paintings will be slightly different....color choices will change, the finger tips of the father hugging the son will change...things like that.  As it turns out, I won't be painting the camel, but the sketching of it was great fun!  I'm not going to tell you what parables these go with...if I've done my job well, you'll be able to tell!  I'll be painting these before the month is out.  I'll post pics when I'm done.

It sometimes amazes me how much time goes into the PREP of a painting.  These three have consumed me for weeks now.  I had to get reference photos.  Then I had to get more reference photos because the ones I had weren't quite right.  In some cases I combined several photos to come up with what I wanted.  Sketch one.  Not quite right.  Sketch two.  No, that's bad.  Sketch three.  Wait a minute....this is all wrong and needs to be completely changed!  Sketch four!  You get the idea.

Even with all the angst and re-drawing, I LOVE doing this!