Cheerful and Colorful Paintings

Cheerful and Colorful Paintings in Oil, Acrylic, Mixed Media and Collage
nancystandlee@sbcglobal.net

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Ventura Fruit Stand, Palette Knife Painting and Liz Steel Sketching Now Class by Texas Artist Nancy Standlee

Ventura Fruit Stand
Oil, 12x12: on Ampersand gessobord panel

The palette knife workshop with Leslie Saeta at her beach house in November in Ventura CA was a combo of plein air and studio. This particular painting was done in the studio on the last day of the workshop. She has just posted her 2015 list of workshop dates. If you are wanting to learn the palette knife she is an excellent instructor. 
In preparation for more traveling and lighter loads, I've just ordered the mini palette (2 lbs.) from James Coulter. I have the compact and standard but I keep wanting smaller and lighter. He has some good videos on how to set up. 
While in California, the Liz Steel Sketching Now online classes started and I'm just now catching up. She lives in Australia and it's the best way I know of for this Texas gal to get to study with her along with hundreds of other students around the globe. Here is part B of my homework for this week on volumes. I used the Stillman and Birn, Zeta book, 7x10". 


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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Boat Oil Palette Knife Painting, Ventura Marina and More Sketching Toys by Texas Artist Nancy Standlee


Ventura Marina 14079
Oil, 12x12 on Ampersand gessobord panel, unframed

On the last blog post I wrote about two California workshops and this palette knife painting was done in Ventura in the Leslie Saeta workshop. I had an interesting post about palm trees and turkey talk and Thanksgiving came and went and you probably didn't have time to read it anyway. Well, maybe just one item from my notes.

One of my jobs at Thanksgiving is to bring LOTS of dressing, chocolate and pecan pies and chopped up fresh fruit salad to whichever child is hosting our get together (my house has outgrown our gathering by too many art supplies) and this time I threw in an apple pie for good measure, but this story will be about the dressing. As a young mother of a 4 year old and we moved to California to face Thanksgiving for the first time without my mother's or mother-in-law's meal so I made a deal with another young Texas mother who had never had to cook a Thanksgiving meal. If our husbands would agree to watch the children we'd attempt to cook them a traditional meal. I came armed with a Lone Star Gas November 1960 Turkey Talk paper and I do think that's what we used for the dressing along with some phone calls back to Texas. Anyway I'm still using that cornbread dressing recipe and it's tearing at the folds and has a few food splatters and blurred notations and the recipe has to be doubled now but it has become a requested dish each November. I stew a few chicken breasts and chop and drop those pieces in before baking just as my Mom did. I hope you got to spend some time with family and enjoyed a favorite dish or started a new tradition. We will meet at Christmas but the evening meal will be snacks like Virginia Ham Biscuits..yum.

I am forever on the quest to find a good messenger bag for outdoor sketching and I found this online from Target, made by Diaper Dude..Yep, it's a diaper bag but I think those pockets for wipes and bottles might make a great place for pens and pencils. I'm loading it up but I haven't taken it on a trial run yet but I love the camo and bright orange zippers. 


Texas Daily Painter, Oil painting, palette knife, boats, marina, Leslie Saeta workshop,  Nancy Standlee Fine Art, Daily Paintworks, Pinterest, Canvas by Canvas, Check Advantage,  paintings for sale,messenger bag, diaper bag,

Original fine art and affordable prints can be found at:
Follow me on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/NancyStandlee/
Order personalized checks, side tear checks, checkbook covers and address labels with a choice of 20 of my paintings on them.