Well Pressed Shirt, in progress, 16×20 inches. South Dakota portrait paintings.

This is the owner of the dry cleaning business in Brookings, SD. My son and I wnt in to pick up my husband’s suit, and when I saw him using this steaming press I was completely enthralled and asked if I could take source photos for painting. What do you think?

I’m going to live with the painting for a couple days, and then I think I’ll make his jeans and boots much darker; work out the values in the bottom 1/3 of the painting…

Portrait artist paints a mom and baby in Holding On

“Holding On” / 6 x 6 in / oil on linen

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This is a man and infant who were standing at the amusement park a couple days ago. I really liked the way he was holding the baby – it looked so intimate. The mom is the purple shape behind them.

I tried to get that nice skin-glow on this one – especially since they were both wearing red, which reflects off of skin so nicely.

Portrait artist paints a mom and children

I love the way Rebecca is adoring her baby and snuggling with her older daughter in this picture, and the wind-blown hair!

SOLD, Rebecca, Catherine and Esme, 6×6, oil on canvas. See available paintings.

Read more about the Mom Loving portrait project here. Email me to submit photos for this project.

As an aside, I have a  collection of art books that I read and reread. I’ve been rereading Kevin Macpherson’s Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light & Color book, again. He always gives me things to think about, and this week I’m going to focus on values.

Orcas Island V

“Orcas Island V”
6 in x 8 in, oil on wood
Jessie Rasche

On our last day of vacation we went to the big park on Orcas. You can drive up to the top of the hill/mountain, walk a little ways up a steep incline to a tower on the edge of a cliff, way way up (it was too foggy to see how far up we were), and then climb up to the top of a tower and look out to the end of the earth. I have a slight fear of heights and had an adrenaline overload by the time we got back down to water level. But it was beautiful and magical. The fog rolled in and out, giving the place a mysterious, other-worldly feel. This is a painting of my guys walking ahead of me up to the tower. I wanted to capture that sweet hand-holding.

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