Big Goat - 11

© Ellen Blonder

Painting fur all day long. I'm two-thirds done down the length of his body, then still need to add highlights and shadow.

Big Goat - 10

© Ellen Blonder

I realized I was already painting the goat's fur way too finely, noodling it in with a 00 brush before I getting the general sweep of all those unruly locks. Today, I roughed it all in with a bigger brush, to refine more gradually.

Big Goat - 9

© Ellen Blonder

I'm filling in the plant on the lower left, in front of the goat. Otherwise, it's hard to judge how light to go with the goat's fur. It doesn't feel like fast progress, until I realize the painting is about four times the area I usually paint. Only the darkest leaves on the bottom are even close to finished.

Big Goat - 8

© Ellen Blonder

The fur is at a point where it looks terrible, with the much of the under color painted, but not the detailed lighter fur over it. It'll be hard to rest until I get it right.

Big Goat - 7

© Ellen Blonder

I've spent the last few days focusing on the lower right side, leaf by leaf, with more and more detail.

Big Goat - 6

© Ellen Blonder

Hard to know what order to paint things, but the bromeliads in the lower right corner wanted attention most, yesterday and today. The leaves aren't done; it's tricky sorting each one apart from the others.

Big Goat - 5

© Ellen Blonder

Hard to spot today's progress, but I worked on underpainting the fur and filling in the grass underfoot.

Big Goat - 4

© Ellen Blonder

Facing the face today, especially those weird goat eyes.

Big Goat - 3

© Ellen Blonder

I wanted to photograph today's progress with my slippers in the picture to give a sense of scale. This one's going to take a while, but at least today I laid washes to cover all that white canvas.

Big Goat Painting - 2

© Ellen Blonder

Roughing in background today, trying to be patient about more careful painting later. 

Big Goat Painting - 1

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

I haven't done a big painting in a long time. This one is on a 3 x 4-foot canvas. After a week of sketching in details to scale, I've finally started the underpainting the last couple of days. I spied the goat in a field in Kapa'a earlier this year, and he posed for me obligingly. Painting his long ivory fur is going to be a challenge.

Fierce Fish Fossil

© Ellen Blonder

Last year, I was fascinated by the fossils at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. I have finally gotten to do a sketch of a giant fish from a photograph that I took. I wish I had taken better notes at the time about it, but its fierce demeanor came through, even in its bony fossilized form. 

Hibiscus Watercolor

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

© Ellen Blonder

In front of the Beach House restaurant in Kauai, a rich orange hibiscus caught my eye. I photographed it months ago, but finally managed to paint it in watercolor. Instead of posting daily progress, I've strung together each day's work in one post to show how I built up the color.

Egrets - Final

© Ellen Blonder

The last time I posted progress on this painting, I felt completely stuck. I took a month off to clean the basement and host house guests. Afterward, I finally could face that the sky needed darkening, as did all three cycads in the background. I also redid the foliage to the left near the smaller egret. This finally feels finished.

O Canada

© Ellen Blonder

A fun thing about going through and cleaning out old stuff is revisiting art that used to make you think you were hot stuff. This is from fifth grade, age 9 or 10, when I had just discovered how to make letters three-dimensional and shade just the edges of the land masses, much more sophisticated than coloring in all the water.

Tools

I've been taking a break from painting while doing some much-needed organizing and cleaning up. What's always fun about that chore is discovering things you didn't know or remember you had. Many of the tools here came from my family's farm, and were thrown into boxes when my parents moved years ago. I don't even know how some of these tools function, but I love their beautiful shapes and the workmanship involved in designing and manufacturing them.