Rose Cat

Rose Cat, originally uploaded by Melsky.

New painting! This is 8x10 inches, watercolor and ink on watercolor paper.

For Sale in Abstract Floral and Cat Art by Melsky

I'm pretty busy at work but finding a small amount of time to paint. I'm going to take some time off this weekend, maybe take a 4 day weekend.

Raw Roses

This is the raw scan of the roses painting. I left the border up! I'm working on another modification of this image. I'd like to make a set of greeting cards with my floral paintings and another with my cat paintings, another with desert paintings and a some holiday cards too. I'm looking at the best online places to order cards. Then I will sell them on Etsy. I think it might be nice to do a series of thank you cards too.

Yesterday I spent all day painting ! Six hours. I was painting a house though, one of the rental properties we manage. I like painting houses though, and the money is good. I like to see how much better the places look after they are painted.

The way I got started painting houses is that I am a rental agent for a property management company. I would go to places that were newly painted and there would be paint on the floor, in the carpet, they would get paint on the woodwork. Switch plates and light covers would be either taken off and they wouldn't bother to put them back on, or they would be covered with paint blocking the outlet holes! The paint jobs don't have to be fancy or perfect, we are dealing with places on a very low budget usually. But it doesn't take much more effort to do a decent job, wiping up paint spills, using drop cloths etc.

Having a good paint job also helps me as a rental agent, it just makes the place look better.

Yesterday was a lovely spring day. Not to say that we probably wont get another snowstorm or too but it's nice to be out. Anymore snow we get will be heavy wet spring snow that pretty much disappears quickly.

Bright Roses

Bright Roses, originally uploaded by Melsky.

New painting! This is acrylic and digital. I painted with acrylic on paper, scanned it, and then added highlights and changed the background.

I think I will try doing this more often. I want to try the technique with watercolors too.

I have a very nice Wacom tablet - where you can use a pen to draw in paint programs on the computer. I tried doing some paintings just on the computer but I found it very hard and they didn't look so good! But I am finding I enjoy modifying paintings I do offline.

When I paint with acrylics, the black I use to outline comes out with reflections on it when I scan it. I actually went through this one and colored all lines flat black. I deepened the colors and changed the background color to orange instead of yellow. I also added highlights. I'll have to put the original up for comparison.

I like painting with watercolors, mostly because they fit in with my busy schedule! That is, it's easy to start and stop watercolors, you don't need to worry about the paint drying on the brush and you only need a watercolor palette, water and brushes. Also, it's not that big of a deal if you get paint on your skin or clothes, it washes out.

I don't like the washed out colors though! But if I do watercolors and modify them I can get whatever colors I want.