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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