Sweet River Studios

After I got the backgrounds painted on my portraits, I decided to take my practice portrait and try to put a light wash of black on dad's jacket so the pencil lines would blend in a bit more. That went horribly wrong. I had black ink seep into the bride's veil and into the white collar and in his boutonniere. I also added tulle to the veil and thread painting to the dress.  After all that, I don't think it really did anything for the picture, which was a bit surprising for me. I also forgot to fix the neckline of the dress. I needed to find the center and flip the left side to the right to make it even. I could only see one side in the picture and forgot to make the other side the same. Again, I'm glad this one is just practice. I also started to define the tiara on mom's head piece. The picture basically showed a white blob. There was no definition whatsoever and I had a hard time seeing even the basic shape. So I basically made it up using seed beads. This was...

I haven't done any portrait work in a really long time and I'm glad some of the things I learned came roaring back to me as I worked on these. I did this picture using nothing but colored pencil and it turned out well since I had a bit of practice on the first 2. This one is much better looking and is a fairly good likeness. I think it'll get a bit better after I get the white veil/dress/tiara and the background tinted. Dad doesn't look quite so alien like, which is always a bonus! The streaky look of the color pencils though are really bothering me. Especially in dad's black jacket. I'll continue trying to smooth those out and if that doesn't help then I may put on a light wash of black ink to try to smooth it out. Unfortunately, dad's mouth/lip area isn't all that good but it looks fairly accurate compared to the picture. I think it was a perfect storm so to speak. He's leaning slightly towards mom, head turned towards the camera, ...

I cut several squares of 20x20" in cream and white fabrics. I'm going to try a few different ways of doing this portrait of my parents and one will definitely be a "practice" square. I took the picture I selected and started to draw my parents onto a piece of fabric. It was okay for my practice piece but it wasn't working out so well. So I decided to just make life a little easier and I bought a small projector on Amazon. I loaded the picture and within 10 minutes I had mom and dad projected on the wall onto one of my fabric squares and I was tracing an outline. I got 3 sketches done in 15 minutes and all of the proportions were right.  My first portrait was done free hand and it seriously went wrong. Sorry, dad but you turned out kinda alien like. I figured I would just use this one to practice on. Painting with coffee turned out to be quite hard. First of all, you can't just make a cup of coffee and start painting. I guess that would've been jus...

Welcome to 2016! I started this blog in April of 2015 and had 68 posts for the year. I wanted to have a record of what I'd had done all year (minus 3 months) and write about it. The good, the bad and the ugly. And I didn't post as much as a I could simply because I'm not in a race with anyone. Most of my posts were about sewing/quilting, my in-laws 50th Anniversary party, some dog activities and some recipes. I assume 2016 will be much of the same. So let's get to it! This year, is my parents 50th Anniversary in June but they don't want a party. We have a very small family and they don't have a lot of friends so a party with 15 people is fairly pointless. So I thought I'd try to make them a keepsake wall quilt type thing. Since I just finished painting my endangered animal quilt, I figured I could paint a picture of them from their wedding day or maybe do a fabric portrait of them. Either one would probably work and I might do both to see which one I l...