Stacy Weitz Minch

I painted this scene from Yellowstone a few months ago, and it's been bugging me ever since. It seemed unfinished, but I was a little afraid to go back over it, for fear I might overwork it and ruin it altogether. But since I was unhappy with it anyway, I decided to go at it this weekend and see if I could make any improvements. On my first attempt, I basically just copied exactly the values from my reference photograph. But on my second attempt, I really tried to visualize the true values of the landscape (photographs clip both ends of the light/dark spectrum, giving false values). There was too much dark in the sky and distant hills, making them jump up into the foreground, and there were too many hard edges I the sky. Although I'm not 100 percent satisfied with this painting (I'm not sure that will ever happen anyway), I'm happy that it seems my changes improved the feel of the image, instead of the opposite, which seems to be what usually happens :)

7 1/8x4 1/4", watercolor on paper, 7/20/15 Today I pulled out my watercolors (it has been years!) to paint with my daughter at the kitchen table for a few minutes. This little candy jar is a favorite item in our kitchen... Looks like it could stand to be refilled :)

6x6, water mixable oil on board, 7/18/15

20x16", water mixable oil on board, 7/15/15 This is a painting from a photograph (taken last fall in Yellowstone National Park) of my husband and daughter walking down some steps coming down from the artist paint pots. I love how my husband is reaching his hand out for my daughter to hold, while she determinedly keeps stepping forward, doing it all by herself :) This painting was a bit of a process. I set out working on it a couple of weeks ago. I started by blocking in the dark areas in burnt umber, and just kept building up the paint from there. For most of the painting, I was documenting my progress as I went along (see photos below if you're interested--I was getting a little tired of it by the end so didn't document the last steps).  In the end, I feel like I may have overworked the image a bit. Honestly, there was a time there when I wanted to scrap the whole thing altogether. I'm glad I kept at it, though, because I think I ended up with a decent

6x6, water mixable oil on board, 7/17/15 Apples are always such willing subjects! I'm kind of tempted to experiment with painting one apple every day for a little while and see what happens :)

6x6", water mixable oil on board, 7/15/15

I've been working on a larger painting the past week or so, which has been occupying most of my creative energies (hence, the lack of any new posts), but last night I managed to get out to figure drawing. We had a male model! And I spent the full two hours on this one :) on another note, I bought a portfolio to store my figure drawings in, and it's really fun to see the progress from week to week. Progress is good :)

12x9", graphite on paper, 6/30/15 I'm still working on becoming really accurate with my drawing lately--mapping out lines, measuring for proportions, etc., because I really want to be able to capture a true likeness of a person. I worked for about an hour and a half on this one, and I'm fairly happy with it--although I did end up making her head slightly too big (she has a rather spritely look to her). I'm discovering that when drawing this small, even the slightest exaggeration of a line has a marked effect on the overall proportions.