Race

Morning,

Saturday evening I took my wife on a date. We went to see "Race" at the local theater. It is PG-13, men in the locker room in towels is as "racy" as it gets. I love a good pun, LOL. A lot of cussing that could have been left out. The movie is the story of Jessie Owens preparing and competing in the 1936 Olympics. Lots of racial tension. Jessie set some world records and won 4 gold medals at the Olympics. It took over 25 years to break his last record. You can watch a preview of the movie with a quick Google search. It is a good date movie. I wont tell you why, don't want to spoil it for you.

Next post I will talk about the current pallet of colors I'm using and how to mix them to get the colors you normally get from a tube.

Until then, have fun painting,
Donald

Hello and welcome to my blog.

I am an artist. I love to paint plein air and in my studio. My specialty is landscapes painted in oils. I am married to a wonderful woman and this June we will celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary. We have one son and a daughter, one dog named Sadia, and a kitten named Jitterbug, 7 chickens, and a calf named Floppy Ears. I live on a small farm that's been in my family for over 100 years. I call it "The Heart of Missouri's Outback."

Mostly I will talk about how I paint. The colors I use, mixing them, and techniques for applying the paint to canvas or gessoed panel. I make my own panels. I also plan to talk about "Marketing Art" because I find it an interesting topic.

I've read that it takes 10,000 hours to master a subject. Well, I painted my first oil painting when I was 10 years old and my mother entered it in the Tulsa County Fair. I won a second place ribbon.

Since then I've spent a LOT of time reading and practicing the art of painting. I have a large collection of books and a wonderful course on Mastering Art. I've read all the course material, 6 volumes, but to actually "Master" all that is being taught takes a life time. Composition, drawing, brushwork, mixing paint, value patterns, Notans, the list goes on.

In 2009 I entered a competition to participate in "Missouri's 50 Best Artists" and one of my paintings was accepted and toured the state.

I am still painting, learning, growing, improving and having a blast painting. There is nothing like sitting down at a blank canvas and wondering how this painting will turn out. I strive for excellence! Sometimes I fail, but I am stubborn. I was trying to split a 16" diameter log about 20" long the other day with my splitting maul. I hit it about 15 to 20 times and the maul wouldn't even stick. Normally I can split a log in 1 to 5 blows. The next day I hit that log 15 to 20 more times, and the next day again. On the 4th or 5th day the maul FINALLY stuck in the log. I KNEW I had won this battle. I picked up my other maul and used the first one like a wedge and split that log. Normally you can see a limb or not, and know that a log will be hard to split. This one had the start of a limb inside, but it didn't show up on the outside of the log. I use that same stubbornness in my paintings too. Sometimes I can fix the painting, other times I set it aside, and paint a different composition of the same subject. I keep at it until I get it right.

That's all I have time for today. Have a wonderful day and have fun painting today, I will.

By the way, Copyright © 2016 ArtByDonaldSmith.com
All rights reserved. All paintings and images on this blog are fully protected under International Copyright Law

May God richly bless you,
Don

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