A Refreshing

As I was checking my reading list to see what was up in the blogosphere, I surfed around to your blogs (those of you who have posted recently) and then I checked in with the folks I follow. There is a woman, near Boston, who is a painter that primarily uses a palette knife to paint. I first fell in love with some miniature palette knife paintings and have casually followed her blog from there. Today I was checking out some recent work on her blog, one piece she posted was a 6" x 8" view of Trinity Church in the heart of Back Bay. She was sent the small canvas last week and given everything going on with the Boston area she decided to paint this community symbol. It is a lovely painting but that is not what caught my attention.

This lovely painting made me want to run outside and paint!

Then, further into her blog she had images from a botanical illustration workshop she attended. There were some good rendering and shading techniques that she shares and I also just liked the idea that an accomplished artist who has such a beautiful loose painting style is taking a class on such a technically tight and exacting way of painting and rendering. You can check out the updates of her three day class by following the links from here http://anngorbett.blogspot.com/2009/04/botanical-illustration-class-day-1.html. It seems to prove that being an artist is like being a teacher, you are constantly educating yourself to improve what you do. Never stop exploring!