self-portrait WIP

This is as young as I'm ever going to get. A self-portrait has been on my year's to-do list, and I might as well get cracking on it before gravity gets another 6 months to pull my cheeks down into my neck.

This is my first go with Arches oil paper, and I LOVE IT. It has the surface of a board, but without the pressure not to screw it up, because it's only about a dollar a page. I am not so worried about my paintings lasting 1,000 years, but the paper can be mounted to board if someone gets a wild hair for preservation.

Also this weekend, I painted some elephant ear pods at the request of my boss, who has a special relationship with them because he parks under the famous Exceptional Tree behind the library and it dumps pods on his car every year. Our elephant ear pod tree has been in books, has local arborists throwing parties for it, and enjoys hugs from tree-lovers around the world. Really.

 And now my tables are covered in pods and I feel weird about throwing them in the green waste bin.

Related: in a fit of homemaking, I got it into my head that I would frame all the decent paintings and get them out of my basement studio, so I drove all around town buying up all the thrift store frames. Now my basement studio is filled with empty frames, because most of them were the wrong size. That is called "spring cleaning".

I hid the naked paintings in areas where guests won't find themselves eyeball-to-buttcrack unless they wander out of the living room - in which case, they GETS WHAT THEY DESERVES.

j/k, I don't have any guests.

Last week of school! Summer is my favorite and my best.