LYLAS 6 ~ "Maggie" ~ Nick's DVD

Lylas 6 "Maggie"
12" x 9" Acrylic on Gallery
Wrapped Canvas
SOLD
This Lylas is named after Canvas by Canvas artist, Margie Whittington.
She has a blog and a web site where she showcases her murals. Probably every CBC member has taken a class from her at the Upstairs Gallery - sometime or the other. Margie posted on her blog her angel attempt Whimsical Angels ah la Nancy.
This one if for you, Margie.
Today I received a very long awaited email from Creative Catalyst stating that the Nicholas Simmons DVD was available for preorder. You can watch a short Flash demo of a painting in progress. I ordered a copy and I am signed up for his workshop at Artists' Showplace, in Dallas, TX., June 9-13, 2008.
Today I found a site by way of Amazon. Don't you love it when they send you an email and say well, you bought this book and we think you'd like this one, Watercolor Sketching, by Brenda Swenson. Well, you know for sure that I did. Brenda Swenson has a great web site and has some great watercolors on her site. She has a short truck demo here. She has painted Pasadena and it has reminded me of another of my favorite Pasadena painters, Joseph Stoddard.
I've tried taking a workshop with him but it was canceled. I have two of his books, Redlands Sketchbook and Pasadena Sketchbook, and love looking at his paintings or sketches. Here is his submission for the Moleskin site and I see that he will have a fall book coming out , publisher Walter Foster, Watercolor Made Easy, Expressive Color.
Another great book for my library of art instruction books and dvds. Now to settle down and take the time to read and study in between painting with my Lylas.

Happy New Year Sunflower ~ Acrylic Painting

"Happy New Year Sunflower"
6" x 6"
$40 purchased through the Canvas by Canvas web site

My coffee and I got the the computer this morning and found a message from Connie about check out my blog. She didn't have to work today and was up early getting back into her blog and has she ever thrown down the gauntlet to the rest of us. She is saying she's going to post each day. Now how is that for a hard act to follow. She was very complimentary of my blog but there is one sentence I need her to explain.." Even if you don't have time to read all she has to offer, you'll enjoy her paintings, ripe with juicy color". Does this sound like to you she is saying I'm a little verbose? I see that Margie has already posted some of our minis on the CBC blog that we painted today at the Upstairs Gallery. We rent the studio space once a week for CBC members to paint assignments or something personal. Today Margie, Connie, Cindy Y, Maryann and I painted some of our assignments for the Neil Sperry Garden Show February 29-March 2.


Connie, Maryann, and Cindy Y
Margie joined us for lunch and painting afterward. Since we all have good intentions the first day of the New Year we opted for Souper Salad restaurant and our intentions were good but the gingerbread and ice cream were very appealing. I didn't see a black-eyed pea on the menu so I'm cooking mine now. In Texas we think we have to eat some black-eyed peas on New Year's Day to give us good luck throughout the year. I soaked them overnight and I have some ham to eat with them and just so I eat them before 12:00 midnight, I'm covered. If you'd like to read about this holiday, the oldest of all holidays go here to read more about it. It seems the early Babylonian's most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment.
Some of CBC members met at Maryann's Monday morning, Dec. 31, (before a business trip in the afternoon) and we watched a new Hugh Greer dvd on acrylic painting. I decided I'd try my sunflower using his palette of Quinacridone Magenta, Indanthrene (Anthraquinone) Blue, Titanium White, Cerulean Blue, Diarylide yellow, and sometimes Pyrole Red. I thought I did pretty good but when I got home and looked over my notes again, I didn't use Indanthrene Blue..in fact, I didn't even own any so now I'll have to go art shopping. I tried to stay within the palette because it would sure help in carting supplies around but I had to keep dipping in my little pill box containers of other colors I can't live without like light blue violet. I'll post a photo of these pill boxes later as we got the idea from an Elin Pendleton video. I did use some of his tips, or I adapted some like staining the canvas and putting gel on it, which I do sometimes anyway. I guess to really be truthful, I didn't do much of anything that Hugh suggested. I didn't have his yellow either. It's a little like cooking. You look at the recipe and end up doing it your way. Today I used Cadmium Orange to stain the canvas (he suggested the Quin Magenta and Yellow mixture). I love painting sunflowers and have done this one in a watercolor before with some cone flowers. This time my cone flower was not cooperating so I just painted it out. This feature is a wonderful advantage with acrylics.
May you have good luck this year whether you ate your black-eyed peas or not today. Since we painted today to start out the new year I hope there will be many more painting days to follow in '08.

Other blogs where I post:

http://artistfoodnetwork.blogspot.com

http://canvasbycanvas.blogspot.com

http://myspace.com/nancystandlee

TO PURCHASE PAINTINGS: Go to Paypal on http://nancystandlee.blogspot.com

Eat Well ~ Paint Your Food ~ Laugh Often

Calypso Burden Series #7 of 10 ~ Backups ~ Email ~ Link ~ FaceBook

7.5" x 5.5" image
Acrylic on 140 lb. watercolor paper
The Calypso series #7 ~ A series of 10 images, all share some of the same vivid colors and technique of acrylic loosely applied onto a gessoed watercolor surface, ready for framing with or without glass as the acrylic has a medium applied for protection.
As I post more images and information on my art blog, I see the need for some kind of backup. I have made a copy of the Template. I am also emailing copies of my blog to myself. I have 2 email addresses and will use one of them for the copies. Here are my steps for Backup:

1. Blogger Template Backup:
Dashboard/Template/Edit
HTML/Backup/Restore Template/Download Full Template
I put it in a blog folder on my hard drive before I removed some of the html code.
2. Email Backup of Posts:
This does not give you a back up of your images – only the
text.
Dashboard/Settings/Show Email Post Links? / Yes/ Save Settings
At the end of the post, there will be a white envelope , click and fill in the
address to send. If you have enabled Google AutoFill you won’t even have to type
the information in. I have my copies archived in my Google Gmail account and I hope it will never be necessary to access them. I email them to myself after all the edits have been done.

I’ve been reading the HELP section trying to find the answer but I didn’t even know how to phrase the question but I tried this today and it works. For example: If I’m referencing something in my email or in another’s in a blog and I want to link to it here's what I do. On the home page of the blog everyone’s url is the same address. But I want to reference a specific post from my friends blog, Betty talking about A Cause for Celebration or Cindy’s post about Pretty in Pink and Connie’s Kick Up Your Heels . or Margie's Nancy’s Red Boots go to their side bar and find the post you want to reference and click on it and that will take you to a specific url when you are taken to that page, copy and paste it into the link button. That works if you want to refer to links within your own blog, also. See below. All of you may already know that but I didn’t.
I tried to register again in FaceBook. See Tuesday’s Post for my FaceBook experience. This time I made it. I registered for the Dallas/Fort Worth area as I overqualified for the high school or college age crowd. Don’t know what I will do now but I’m registered. A message from FB said I’m now able to email my friends and tell them I’m registered but my friends don’t belong to FB and are not in the database so no friends yet. I don’t think I know one person that uses Facebook.
At least there are 3 friends in Calypso Burden painting. I wonder if they met on FaceBook or in a painting class somewhere?

Sold ~ CALYPSO ANGEL Series #4 of 10 by Nancy Standlee BLOG and PING

SOLD to an art collector in Austin, TX

7.5" x 5.5" image
Acrylic on 140 lb. watercolor paper
The Calypso series #4.

I’m in “blogging infancy” and absolutely enjoy sharing my images each day. Not everyone in our Canvas by Canvas group agrees but Margie Whittington does. Here is her email to me this morning after finding more search items related to her name and the blogs and edited in part,

"****Thank you Nancy for being our R & B GURU ! (Research and blogging guru)
***** Now besides CBC Sistahs, we are..."Nancy and the Bloggernuts"....sounds
like a children's TV show.
Have a good day everyone. I'm off to paint
fairies and flowers in Alyssa's room in Benbrook.
I'll catch up on the
emails this evening.
Margie"

Yes, Margie I agree, “Nancy and the Bloggernuts” sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon. She may be referring to a hint I sent yesterday from morning research I did for getting traffic to your blog. I think others might like to have this information also.
1. Pinging connects or notifies a number of services that update and track your blog by crawling and indexing your site to help increase your blog’s popularity. Why would you want to be "pinged"? In May 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs.

2. This service, Pingoat, will ping several services at once. I tried it and so did some of the others from CBC and will it help? We’re newbie’s and we don’t know but here is how I did it. I skipped the first yellow highlighted area, scroll down to Get Started, and fill in your information. I left Xml blank because I didn’t know what it was. This is a little confusing when they say ( Click category title to Select all ;-) You click on GENERAL and all the ones below are checked. I did not check non-English nor Special and then GO PINGOAT!

No guarantees it will work. It’s just what I did. Why? I think blogs are
changing the landscape and I want to be a part of it.
Here is another site that has more pinging information from Quick Online Tips

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/09/one-click-multiple-blog-services-pinging
But I see that this is a 2005 archive and may not be current.

What do you see in this painting exhibited today? Do you see a mysterious lady with wings, an angel perhaps or a figure surrounded by a very colorful sky? I thought of an angel, a supernatural being, a guardian acting as God’s messenger to man. I scraped into the surface with the end of the brush and color shaper tools, splattered paint, and generally just got messy with the painting. This series is painted on a ground of white gesso on watercolor paper.

Click on the Dick Blick icon on the right for more information about the Colour Shaper tools from one of my favorite art suppliers, Dick Blick. Be sure you search COLOUR Shapers.

Colour Shapers are a revolutionary tool for painting, drawing, lifting, and blending. Invented by artists for artists, Colour Shapers combine tradition with exciting new technology. The durable tips are made of an advanced rubber composite. Apply oil or acrylic paint straight from the tube with a Colour Shaper, and then use it to carve back into the paint for a variety of texture and surface effects. The tool easily lifts paint from the surface or draws lines, contours, and edges on the color. With seamless nickel ferrules and lacquered hardwood handles, they offer the quality needed by dedicated artists. To clean, simply dip the tips in water or solvent and wipe with a cloth. Don't worry — dried color just peels away!

BLOG AND PING. New vocabulary? Are angels ancient territory in the realm of man or as new to you as blog and ping? Blog. Ping. Angels.

Christian Cross Acrylic Painting by Nancy Standlee

$90.00
10” x 8” 1 ½” profile Gallery Wrapped Canvas
Acrylic on Canvas

This Christian Cross Painting has been a WIP (work in progress) from a class I took from a Canvas by Canvas member, Margie Whittington. Our instructions were to bring a design to class, ready to paint. I found a photo taken at my daughter’s of a wooden cross she had on the wall. I have a photo file of different styles of crosses but since this one is hers, it makes it more special to me. Acrylics tend to darken as they dry, and it seems this painting had become a little gloomy since it was first painted so I decided on this day of celebration I’d brighten up the painting.
The collaborative art group I belong to has painted and sold several larger cross paintings made up of six 6” x 6” squares. The cross is one of the most ancient human symbols and this general shape is used by Christianity. Sometimes it is a representation of the world into 4 elements. For more information on the cross shape, go to Wiki.