My husband took this footage during a recent trip to the DC Zoo.



If you've been wondering where I've been, I'm mostly on Facebook or my personal website these days.  Look for me there.

My 2009 Nature Calendar is now available!

Thank you to everyone who complimented my butterfly painting and my latest video. 

When I paint now, I'm not concerned with trying to capture the details of the photograph.  If someone wants a photograph of, say, a butterfly, I can just show them the photo.  Now when I paint, instead of driving myself nuts with trying to be technically perfect or photorealistic, I'm painting how I feel about the subject.  Trying to capture what it is about the subject that has meaning for me.

Of course, I have to keep in mind some technical issues - how this pigment mixes with that pigment, color issues, perspective, shading, shape, etc.

But with that butterfly, for example...what struck me about the real life butterfly was how the black shifted to light blue on the lower half of the wings, the line of spots and their color shift, and the touches of white along the edges of the wings.  In the photo, those touches are barely there, but in my mind, they stood out vividly, so when painting it, I painted what I 'felt' - that the touches were larger than they actually were.

I just wanted to talk about all that because I actually haven't painted for a while and I'd been thinking about what changed.  Why did the butterfly turn out so well when in the past painting had been so much of a struggle that I stopped for a while... and that was the answer that bubbled up from my nether-brain.  Because I wasn't painting to my teacher's style or techniques, that I painted in a way that made sense to me and focusing on the aspects of the picture that had meaning for me.

Finding my own style, in other words, I think that would be called.