7-04-06: My Sister Anita

I decided to try the Donna Dewberry technique on the daisies.  I double-loaded the bristlette brush with pale blue and white and dragged it along the petals.  It helped some.  Then I added touches of pale yellow and pale red to the petals and sort of outlined them in a pale blue-grey.  It's better.  I added a few wisps of hair in front of the one long barrette and signed the painting.  Tomorrow when I take Mom to town I will look for a book on how to do flowers in acrylic to see if I can find a way to improve them.  For now I'm done.  I don't know how else to improve it.

7-03-06: My Sister Anita

I didn't have to sand it off today, but what I tried yesterday did not achieve what I wanted to achieve.  So today I went over some of the yellow areas in light blue and some in white.  The stem needed more layers, so I added them using the green purple mixture.  To highlight it and add form, what worked best was the bright yellow green color.  I also added more highlight to the beads, this time using a pale yellow.  Then I was sick of the whole thing, thinking I needed to find instruction on how to paint realistic tiny flowers - in acrylic.

7-02-06: My Sister Anita

I focused on the flowers this time.  A conversation with Phil encouraged me to used a palette knife in a study.  After a short time I realized that wasn't going to work.  My palette knife with the point was broken.  He's also suggested I try using a very small brush, like a liner brush to create the needed lines in the flower petal.  So I found my #1 round ebony splendor.  I used heavy white paint to create ridges.  Next I added a number of colors in strips, kind of.  Then I overlaid that with a very pale yellow, using the bristlette brush.  I added number of layers to create more texture.  Plus, I dabbed orange-brown in the center of the flower, to make it look a little mounded.  Tomorrow I will see if it's a good start with petals, or if I have to sand it off.

7-01-06: My Sister Anita

Mostly today I worked on the daisies.  Gold was the wrong color for the underpainting - at least on a yellow background.  So I added a little blue to white and started experimenting.  They do show up okay now, but they look flat, two dimensional.  I think I need to switch to a different brush to add shading.  The bristlette isn't thin enough.  I scumbled yellow-white over the end of the daisy stems and also another coat of it to cover part of Anita's arms.

6-30-06: My Sister Anita

Today, I worked on the lips a little and reshaded the jaw line in a minor way.  I removed the freckles from the forehead and added a little more white to the beads.  Next I did a minor study on a separate piece of canvas to help figure out how to arrange the daisies.  I forced the courage and drew them onto the painting canvas - I used a gold colored pencil so it wouldn't be hard to cover up.  I undercoated the daisies with gold, using a Grumbacher Bristlette round brush.  The texture of the paint was fairly thin.  I outlined the daisies with a blue-brown color to give the edge definition.  After that I painted in the stems and leaves.

6-29-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on the jaw line, the area around the eyes, the lips - adding highlight and more shading beneath them.  I scumbled in a little more pink to the facial tone...then discovered in a different light it was too pink.  I reshaped the nose a little and added a few freckles - again.  They got wiped out before.  Then I painted the base white color - white with a touch of blue-gray to the beads.  I also feathered in more yellow at the bottom of the painting.

6-26 through 6-29-06 Repainting Signature and Adding Copyright Symbol

The last three days I wiped out my old signature and date on all my paintings and repainted them.  This time I used Vi H-F as a signature instead of just Vi, so I would be easier to identify, and I added a copyright symbol before the date.  This required that I paint over the old ones, repaint what was beneath it and then repaint the signatures.  All this because of the selfishness of theft.

6-25-06 Theft and the Internet: My paintings, Our Artwork - Please don't steal our stuff.

Periodically we hear of famous paintings being stolen from museums, from private collections.  We even hear about this happening in wars - a case in point, paintings that were stolen during WWII once people had fled their homes.  Most of us can't imagine ourselves actually stealing a painting.  But it happens.  Ordinary law abiding people steal stuff all the time - on the Internet.  This has been well documented by the music industry as people download music without permission.  This is theft.  The people who do this are thieves.  They think there is nothing wrong with it.  Yet, these same people would be upset and demand the police do something to catch the thief if someone stole their car, their stereo, any of their possessions.

Let's consider what theft is.  The American Heritage Dictionary(AMH) defines theft as: The crime of taking someone else's property without consent - larceny, stealing and purloining.

There is another issue relative to someone else's work to consider - that of copyright.  AMH defines copyright as: The legal right granted to an author, a composer, a playwright, a publisher, or a distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.  It is of or relating to a copyright, copyright law, a copyright agreement.  Things under copyright are protected and permission must be gained to use or publish the material.

Everyone's work is automatically copyrighted once they create it.  You don't have to register it.  It's your work, be it a novel or a piece of visual art, or whatever your creation is.  And no one else has the right to it without your permission.

As an artist it is against the law for me to copy someone else's work and claim it as my own.  If I paint a painting like someone else's I must give them credit, or change it significantly.  I am careful to do this.  Since Jerry Yarnell taught me to paint, if I display one of my paintings that his lessons inspired, I give him credit.  He's a great teacher, a good man, so willing to share his knowledge to help me grow.

To go to someone else's website and without permission copy their images into your own website or link their images into your website from their server would also be theft.  I would not do this.  But others do this all the time.  The theft is twofold - first, in taking the artwork without permission and second in using up my purchased bandwidth.  When a person does this with one of my paintings, for example, it usually is not stored on their site.  It is on my site, on my server.  So every time it is displayed on their site, it is pulled from my server and uses up my bandwidth - this costs me money.  Needless to say, I don't like it when someone illegally takes my money for any reason.

Some people may not be aware that statistics are kept of everyone who visits a site.  These statistics are available to the owner of the site through the website host.  Ours is FutureQuest.  They are an excellent host.  Periodically my husband, who is the webmaster of our site, checks the statistics for who has been accessing our site, where the links come from etc.  This is helpful in terms of advertising and such.  It helps the site owner know what's working and what isn't.  With each link to our site we can go back to see who it was.  That's how we discovered that our work is being stolen and displayed elsewhere at our cost.  The thieves don't give us credit for the work or even a link back to our site as compensation.

Had they asked if they could display our work, we more than likely would have said yes, if it's a respectable site, and if they agreed to display our website URL under our work, so people can link to us.  It would be good advertising.  Unfortunately no one has asked.  They just stole it.  Yesterday, for example, we discovered, a fourteen-year-old girl on My Space dot com had stolen one of our works through a link to our server.  We can't contact her to tell her to cease and desist because older people can't contact the younger ones, and she has a private forum, invitation only.  There are, however, a couple of things we can do.  We plan to do them.  We also discovered my painting, Dear Heart, was being displayed on a lovely site.  The person's name is Dorenna.  Beneath the stolen image was a poem.  Dorenna either was inspired by the painting to write this poem, or she stole the poem from someone else and put the two stolen creations together.  On her site she even talks about rules - about respecting the rights of others.  She does not practice what she preaches.  Here again, my webmaster husband took action.

As the victim of these thefts it takes us time and effort to detect the problem and subsequently correct it, take appropriate action.  Time is money.  It is such an annoyance.

Some people believe we have entered an age of enlightenment.  Honestly, I have my doubts.  When people think that other people's stuff is free for them to take without permission, this demonstrates we have a long way yet to go.

6-23 and 24-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on shading around the eyes and taking out the mascara look.  Still trying to get that wistful look in her eyes.  Can't seem to manage it.  I added shading to the lips, around the eyes and the jaw line.  Then had to take a damp tissue and wipe some of it off.  I painted black along the edge of the lettering on the sweatshirt, painted in the white star and streak along the horses nose and shaped the horse a bit, as well as the rider.  I really don't know if it's better or not.

6-22-06: My Sister Anita

I've been recovering from a bad cold and haven't been painting.  Tonight I got back to it.  This time I used the transparency image Phil created from the photo of Anita and overlaid it onto the picture he had taken of the painting.  From that I had a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.  So I worked on the eye area and in shading the face.  I faded the bottom of her sweatshirt into the yellow background.

6-11-06 : My Sister Anita

I brought the lower part of Anita's left eye, as you face her, down a little, making it larger.  I readded the freckles and shaded her left cheek a little more.

6-09-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on reshaping the area around the eyes, the eyes, broadening the nose and some shading on the cheeks.  I readded the sparkle to the eyes.  I added a reddish pink for shading in some of the areas, in some I added blue to the mixture.  I need to paint in the freckles again.  They are gone now.  I underpainted the lettering on her sweatshirt.  This was accomplished by drawing the letters first with white charcoal pencil and then coloring it in with a Grumbacher Bristlette round brush, size one.  I also underpainted the horse and the rider.  The problem here is that I really can't tell what is what, i.e. the picture is faded.  I'm having to extrapolate.  I did find a picture of a horse rearing back like the one on the shirt, although the one I found is white and the one I'm painting is brown.  But it should help me do a better job of shaping the horse.

6-7-07: My Sister Anita

Tonight I lightened what looked like eyeliner along Anita's eyes.  I worked on the nose, and I extended the hairline higher.  I also lightened the eyebrows a bit.

6-6-06: My Sister Anita

I read in an article in The Artist's Magazine that to shade a face, add the compliment to the base skin color.  So since the color was peach, one should add a little blue.  I did that.  It turned out to be better than grey or brown.  I worked the entire face with subtle shading.  I extended skin color into the hair along the face.  Next I lowered her right eye, as I face her.  I had to reshaped both eyes, the eyelids, and adjust both irises.  I think it's better, but I'm not sure.  Tomorrow I will add more layers.

6-2-06: My Sister Anita

I painted the straggly hairs along the neckline and hairline.  Some of it went fine, but along the neck I had to keep wiping it off.  The consistency of the paint was the problem.  It was just too wet, which thickened and faded the hairs.  I also added a lighter shade to strands of the regular hair.  I reshaped the jawline on the left side, bringing it down a little along one edge, tried reshading the face to make it look longer and thinner.  Just can't seem to get it right.  I also underpainted a few of the beads, making them grey.  I also worked on the eyes, adding black to the iris, repositioning the pupil on the left eye, and created more of an arch in the eye itself.  I faded out the eyebrows a little by swishing them, brushing them with a lighter brown.

5-31-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on reshading the face a little more and creating better shading around the neck and edge of the sweatshirt.  My coloring on the face is still off.  I need to lighten the eyebrows.  They look too sculpted for a child's.

5-29 and 5-30-06: My Sister Anita

I've been working on reshaping the chin and neck on her left side as I face her.  I've brought it in, then out and now I need to go in again.  That made part of the ear a little wider.  I extended her upper hairline out a little to make her face look a little more triangular.  To do this, first I used a mix of mostly white, a little ultramarine blue and a little cadmium red, overtones of the blue.  Later I added yellow and white over that.  I re-added the eye brows.  I got them too dark, so I added streaks of skin tone in the eyebrows.  I added a mix of burnt sienna and Payne's grey and a touch of white and added a second layer to the hair.  The face still looks too fat and the eyes are still off.  They are now too round.

5-28-06: My Sister Anita

I brought the chin line, along Anita's left side as I face her, down a little.  And I worked on shading the chin line.  I added more dark color along the line between the upper and lower lip.  I realized that the top of the head was too wide.  What I thought was a bunch of hair was just wisps, so I had to start covering the dark color with yellow and white.  I reworked her hair line to some extent, making it look a little more wispy.  I brought the neck out a little on the left side and then it was too fat, so I took it off some.  In my painting, her face still looks too full.  She was thinner in the photo.

5-27-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on reshaping the lips and reshaping the eyes a little.

5-26-06: My Sister Anita

I mixed up a pale yellow and white and used that over the blueish tone on the lighted side of the face and neck.  It is better now.  After studying her hair, I realized what it is doing, how it is corralled into a barrette on one side.  And I'm beginning to see more of the subtle difference in shading.  I realized after watching Jerry Yarnell's instruction on painting a mailbox, that the same principal applies to faces.  He said it takes about ten layers of paint to achieve the desired results in the rounding and creating the look of the metal.  The ten layers idea made me realize I'm not doing so bad after all on the faces.  The depth and contour takes a while.

5-25: My Sister Anita

I worked on Anita's sweatshirt, adding more layers.  To create the color I used ultramarine blue, a small amount of purple and some white.  After I was done with that layer I washed the brush and then used the same one to work on the face.  Turns out I hadn't gotten all the blue out of the brush.  Seeing the effect of the blue, I decided to cover the whole face, neck, and eyebrows with a light layer of this blue.  It helped take out the over-pink coloring that looked so unnatural.

5-22-06: My Sister Anita

Today's main focus was in painting an aura like white around Anita.  The background was too yellow everywhere.  The lighter whitish color was covered when I painted her in.  I painted in a little along the edges of her head and shoulders, so that I could later add loose hairs and such, and so that she wouldn't become disproportionately too large.  I also drew in shapes for shading, in some places using white charcoal pencil and in others a brown colored pencil to see if I could sculpt her face into a better shape before painting it.

5-19 and 5-20-06: My Sister Anita

I worked on the reshaping of the face in general.  The skin color is still too pinkish.  It's hard to fix.  I looked in a book, How to Paint Skin Tones, by James Horton, published by North Light Books, under skin tones for light skin.  In this book and in a magazine article I discovered I need raw umber.  It apparently isn't as red.

5-18-06: My Sister Anita

Anita's eyes, lips, eyebrows were in the wrong place, so I had to relocate them.  To get the exact right location I overlaid the picture of her onto the canvas and poked pins through in several places along the edges of these features.  I can now hold it to the light from the back and see the outline made by the holes.  I will be painting over those holes and see how it works.  I painted over the bad stuff and repainted parts.  I realize I made the paint for her face too dark.  Now it's hard to add lighter skin without adding a bunch of paint.  I think doing skin with acrylics works best and avoids build up if I use a filbert bristle brush and only a small amount of paint on the brush - after I've underpainted.

5-17-06: My Sister Anita

Using the photo that Phil colorized I underpainted Anita.  One thing I'm thinking as a good thing, when doing the initial stages, is to make sure the paint is a little runny.  That way if I'm off, it won't be so hard to fix or get rid of any edges I inadvertently leave.

5-13-06: My Sister Anita

Today I did a rough sketch.  Since the photo is black and white, I went to the web to find a colored picture of Melissa Gilbert at the same approximate age.  I found one.  There is a similarity in their appearance.  Phil took Anita's photo into PhotoImpact and is going to do a transparency, overlaying the dominant skin tone from Melissa's photo onto the black and white photo of Anita.  It will be great if it works.  Nice to have a husband who loves me so much.

5-11-06 : My Sister Anita

Tonight I underpainted the background for the painting of Anita when she was 7 or 8.  Since she loved yellow I painted yellow around the edges.  The center is lighter.