Art website

Coop made me a new-and-improved website for my artwork. It's so wonderfully nice how he does these things for me because I'm totally hopeless when it comes to computers, as some of you probably know. Basically it's a miracle I can blog on my own. My most embarrassing moment was in 8th grade when idiot that I am I thought I looked around for a button/switch to turn on my computer in a computer lab and pressed the first one I saw and turned off half the computers in the room. You don't make a lot of friends that way! Anyway, check it out when you get a sec and let me know what you think. It's www.alishabwhitman.com. Thanks!

Wahoo!

So I entered a few pieces in the LO Festival of the Arts again this year. When we got to the artist's reception, we started to wander through the 1,000+ artworks, and Jenelle was the first to spot mine. But what was hanging beside it was quite the fun surprise:
I've never got one of those before!! I won an honorable mention ribbon award thingy! (The funny thing is, this is the painting that was the last minute decision to put in. The other two were going in for sure, but we kept going back and forth between entering this one or a different one. Guess we made the right choice :) ) We were pretty excited. Well actually, the girls didn't care too much. They were much more excited about the free buffet tables of yummy food for the artists. Nothing surprising there :) Here are the other two I entered:Sadly none of them sold but it was exciting and fun to see them up regardless. By the way, these are some others I've done recently that I just entered into a juried competition:
I'm really happy with the first. I really don't like the 2nd but Cooper loves it. I've been having fun trying to be a lot looser lately although I haven't got it figured out at all. I spend a heck of a lot of time just staring at the page with a brush in my hand, accomplishing nothing because I can't figure out how to make it work. What can I say, sometimes my brain just doesn't work. The lack of AC doesn't help either. Regardless, the one positive side to all the time Coop has to spend applying to jobs in the evening, is that I have some time to paint. More to come :)

Creative experiments

So I hadn't been painting at all, and frankly haven't painted this month that Coop's been gone, but I'm finally getting around to loading these pics so I can hopefully see what you think. I basically was really bored of what I usually do and wanted to have some fun giving something a bit more expressive and loose a try. I did this one first:
Then I painted this one:
And then going way outside the box for me - not even drawing inspiration from a photo but just from my head - I tried this one. I LOVED it as a drawing and halfway through and was rather unhappy with it when I got done.
So I changed it a bit. Still not thrilled. I feel like it makes my eyes go blurry. Not quite sure what's wrong - lack of focal point? too much going on? soft edges not working with hard one? colors? composition? I just don't know. I think it's better than it was, but I'm not even sure about that. But here it is as at present:
So what do you think of them? Any suggestions?

Gallery garden party

Last Monday I got to go paint outside at the gallery all day while clients came by, watched, and asked about my art. Kinda intimidating for a first time, but fun, and nice to get to paint so much!
I only included the second picture to show the painting I was working on that's almost done.

Here's one of the paintings that I'd finished ahead of time to show as recent work (this is now for sale in Feingold Home in Bend).
This was one that I was trying to finish. The road kinda baffled me - there was so much of it and it was such a detraction and I wasn't sure what to do to finish it.
So I cheated - I cropped it. This is about what the final product looked like (it's also for sale in Bend at Feingold Home). Does it look okay like this?

Blue eyes

With all the colds and need for sleep (not that we're totally out of the woods, Jell has two ear infections), I haven't been painting much recently but I did finally pick this one back up and finish it tonight. Do you like it?

I still can't decide if I should paint the blue background. It would help her, and her eyes for that matter, stand out more, but it would take away the hard pencil line that I kinda like. It also might add confusion as to where the warm reflected light is coming from (the walls - which are behind and to the side of the blue highchair back). For now I think I'll leave it and take it and the one with the two girls in the hammock tomorrow to a critique group where I'm the youngest and least experienced by probably 30 + years. They're all super nice and really know their stuff but it does make me feel a bit awkward - like being a freshman again, or like being back in my art classes surrounded by all these kids who had gone to private art schools their whole lives and talk a whole lingo that goes so far over my head that I need closed caption to have a chance of following what's going on. I interpret 2 year-old gibberish all day long these days; fancy vocab is a bit foreign. Here's hoping I learn something instead of just feeling like the slow kid who can't think of anything to say.