a brand new one!

this is one i just did for my sister-in-law of a butterfly that i took a photo of when we were at butterfly world in florida in march.

more houses

i finally painted our own house last year while we were in florida.



and this other house was painted for a friend of a friend who was moving and wanted a keepsake of her too small house!

here is an acrylic painting of my friend julie's best friend 'teddy' who sadly passed away a few years ago. i figured it would probably make her sad when i gave it to her for her birthday, but i knew she would love to have this as a reminder of such a wonderful dog.

here are a couple of copies that i did for a friend who loves this style, and in the hockey one i painted 3 of the kids with outfits of her own 3 kids!

along with my header painting, here are a couple others of my wild animal phase. the giraffes is a 30 x 30 canvas and the tiger cub and her mother is only a 12 x 14 and i still own them all!

animal phase

after the houses, i go into my animal painting phase and this is a siamese cat that i painted directly onto the bathroom wall. i like the second photo with the blinds casting a shadow, so that you can see the eyes better than in the first photo. i tried to make him life size but my son-in-law teases me about being a HUGE life size cat!

here is the painting of my sister's entrance to her condo which she took a photo of last week!

in 2004 i decided to give my daughters, one of my sisters and all my friends a small painting of their houses for christmas, without them knowing about it. i secretly went to everyone's house and took a photo and then made a 5x7 painting for each of them.

since both my sisters live in b.c. and i only had a photo of my older sister's house, my younger sister had to wait a year or two until i got out west to take a photo of her apartment building for her to get hers! she did send me photos of her balcony, but in the end i decided that that would be quite a boring painting and i decided to do the painting of the entrance since it had such a lovely garden in front, but you will have to wait to see it, because i lost the photo that i had taken of it when i lost a whole year's worth of photos on my computer, grrr...!

i painted these three little guys for my sister and her husband in 2003, since there rec room had a wild animal theme to it.

me, an artist ?

when i was young my favorite subject in school was art, but it was only once a week and i had to wait til friday afternoon last period. i used to sketch everything and anything and tried my hand with charcoal, pastels and tole painting when i was doing ceramics back in the 80's.

i only started painting on canvas about 6 years ago, after i was encouraged to do them instead of my painted animal rocks by another artist at an exhibition i participated in. being a self taught artist, i make many mistakes, but i love the process of seeing a blank canvas turn into a painting with a few brush strokes. i never thought of myself as an artist until i painted canvases for my friends and they liked my work and that was encouragement enough to continue.

so this blog will be a collection of my paintings, so that i may keep track of them, since most belong to someone else now. i painted this calico cat for my american cat loving friend back in 2005.