Drawing a Day: RSM Day 28

I took a week off from the blog and from life to go on vacation with my family. While there, I actually managed to do two paintings. I don’t know that either painting is “finished” but I did as much as I could in the time I had, and they are what they are.

Now that I am home, with my full time job and two kids, I rarely have time to paint. Ok, scratch rarely and make it never, as it applies to most of the year. I only paint once a year, in the summer, when we go on vacation, and that’s because my step-dad makes a point of taking me out and leaving the kids with my husband, so that I can actually concentrate. I owe a great deal of my sanity to him for his helping me to get time away to paint.

In my real life, if I even try to paint, my kids inevitably need something by the time I’ve set up my pallet and it’s time to just put it all away again. Painting after they’ve gone to sleep is out of the question too, since I am usually too tired by then to do much of anything.

My first painting of the year

This image is of the first of the two paintings I did. I took the photo as my easil stood under a light source. That’s why a section of it looks all washed out. I will try to snap another photo of it without a direct light source so that I can get rid of the shiny part. Still, the photo captures it. The subject was of an old tug boat that in its day used to push logs down the Ottawa River up in Ontario Provence, Canada. My step-dad had been wanting me to paint this particular boat for years. I actually painted this from the river itself, while anchored in my step-dad’s boat, just off shore.

While I spent a couple hours on sight painting this. I would like to further define the boat and the leaves, etc. but this is all I could get done in one sitting. I used up all of my paint and managed to get color on the entire canvass. I think that’s close enough to success as I can find time. So, I present it here as another one of my drawings a day.

Enjoy,
RSM