And here’s the finished painting, in acryllic, in it’s frame. It’s about 19″ by 26″, painted on masonite.
Every Christmas I try to do a painting for my wife. This year’s painting features our daughter’s tortoise in my wife’s garden. This is the reference sketch I made, which was a huge help.
I know it’s a few days late for Christmas, but things have been unusually busy at the Zierhut household this year. Have a great new year!
She’s only ten years old, but loves sitting quietly and making beautiful things for friends and family…
The annual Cookie Bake where just about everyone from my wife’s family comes over to share their Christmas cookies and dividing them up for everyone. Great fun.
The baby reached for a leaf to eat just as I was drawing his (her?) arm. Perfect.
I went to the local zoo with my daughter over the Thanksgiving holiday and spent a wonderful time with her looking at the animals and sketching them.
I was impressed that they had a videographer there on the field.
Here are four blogs I’m finding myself visiting every day now:
ILLUSTRATION ART — a wonderfully written blog on illustration, past and present, with terrific visual examples. The analyses and human story angles are wonderful, and spot-on, in my opinion.
Today’s Inspiration — a daily upload of illustrations from the 1940s through the 1970s (for the most part); an interesting time for illustration, when academic training was mixed with abstraction and experimentation. The author also has a wonderful knack for finding information about near-forgotten illustrators of the era and their lives and work habits.
Harry Borgman Art Blog — both of these men are now in their eighties: the former retired and uploading absolutely stunning illustrations from his past; the latter still going strong and sharing great works from past and present. They both write well and have great stories concerning the art they show. Mr. Borgman has an amazing range of work, from fine art, experimental, pure abstraction, to grounded-in-reality paintings and intricate line drawings. His textbook on line drawing, published in the late 1970s was something I, as a teenager crazy about pen and ink, checked out so often from our public library in Richardson Texas that it was dog-eared by the time I left for California.
All of these are a pleasure to see and read about, so I’m sharing them with you.
Anthony Zierhut 