I'll Paint Rocks, (if I have to!)

I joined facebook in 2009 not knowing very much about it. After stumbling around for awhile I got the hang of posts, friends and likes. In 2010 I posted my paintings in an album on facebook and shared them with my friends. The positive response to the paintings was really overwhelming.  I am always hoping people will like my work and the comments my friends left on the pages showed they did.

Brenda, a high school friend, saw the paintings and contacted me.  Her husband Jack Leustig is a premiere print maker in the United States.  His gallery, JLI Gallery, is located in Taos New Mexico and uses the finest print equipment. Jack believes that reproducing art is an art itself.  Brenda, showed her husband my paintings, he was impressed and asked me if I would like him to make prints and greeting cards of my work and sell them in his gallery.  I said SURE!  Jack told me that since his gallery is located in the Southwest he would mainly be interested in animals from that area.  I thought, "I want to get in this gallery so bad that I would paint rocks if that is what he wanted."

I painted fox kits first.  It was April 16th tax season was over and my brushes were dusty and I was anxious about painting.  I wanted this project to appeal to Jack so he would put it in his gallery.  I really put a lot of pressure on myself to do a good job.

 This is a photo of the original block in of the painting.  I was going to make the kits in front of a mossy den in a wooded area.  I had all the reference material for the habitat but after I got the painting this far the den looked like a big pile of, I'll say, mud???  This painting is a good illustration of how I had to fix something I didn't like after I already spent 20 or more hours painting.  Sometimes I have to just let it go and paint over it or if its wet wipe it off.

Here is another 30 hours or so later. I had painted the whole den area with rocks,  Once again it I thought it was too much brown round rocks.  So I covered most of the rocks with a desert plant.  I thought the green next to the orange of the foxes was a much better composition anyway.

This painting ended up being one of my most popular paintings. I've sold quite a few prints and cards of these guys. You can see in the finished painting at the top of the page, I added more plants to cover up even more of the rocks.  Oh well, you know there is a really detailed den behind all that foliage.

Here is the link to JLI Gallery in Taos New Mexico

http://www.jliprints.com/

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http://foreverwildexotics.org/

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