This is a very small oil painting of a quarter horse.
This is the actual size, I went through a stage of doing minatures, and now I'm doing the opposite and trying to make myself paint bigger canvases.

You learn something from each approach, but I do have a fond spot for these little paintings, done with 000 sable brushes. They don't use much paint or canvas (board in this case) and can be finished in a couple of hours.
I don't think my eyes would be good enough to paint this small now, perhaps that's why I want to make things larger.

This is a sketch of my third son.

He was three years old when I did it (he's 19 now!), and I must admit I have quite a few drawings of him asleep, and almost none of him awake! Too hard to capture all that energy, so I'd wait until he was nice and quiet- much easier.
I hardly drew my first two sons at all, I guess I was too busy. I regret that I haven't got a nice 'sketch from life' of all my boys but I can't change that now.. Perhaps I'll be more diligent if I ever have grandchildren.

I was flicking through a book the other day and discovered this sketch hidden among the pages.
I haven't traced the painting I copied it from, but I'll look through a few more books and find it soon. I should have written it on the actual drawing I suppose.

I've always wanted to make a collection of faces that interested me, much like Laurelines 101 faces project. I was only going to do 50, and started drawing but I got bogged down because I decided later that I wanted them all the same size, on the same paper. This is only on cheap photocopy paper and someone who shall be nameless (third son) had torn the bottom off to write a phone number on. GRRR! ("Don't worry" he assured me, "You can draw another one")

I'm loving having a scanner and being able to play with cropping and resizing these works, some are on little scraps of paper, or cheap paper like this and there's even a couple on the backs of envelopes. But scanned and cropped they somehow look more important, more substantial, more significant somehow.
Don't you love eyes? I plan to play around and have a series of eyes from my paintings and sketches, and today I mucked around making greyscale images of the works I'd already stored. I do love having this technology!

I'm scanning some old drawings to preserve them, the paper is getting very yellow and brittle.
I love being able to scan my work and store it in the computer, it's great to have a record of what I've done over the years. I don't think I'll feel bad about selling favourite pieces as long as I've got a good image of it to remember it by. I used to take photos, but scans are in another class, you can zoom in and see the detail, print perfect replicas, play with making cards- I don't understand technology, but I love what it can do!

This is a sample of the work I'm doing now.

I wish that I was a bit free-er and more slapdash , as I used to be when I was pushed for time and just dashing things off. But perhaps this tightness is a phase too.

One of the results of not having much money to spend on materials is that I began painting in a small format. That meant I could use cheaper canvases and little dabs of paint. This oil is only 8 x 10, but I recently bought some much larger supports that are sitting on the shelf, beckoning. I think if I made myself work larger it would automatically loosen up my style and make me more spontaneous.
I don't seem to have trouble with my sketching style, which is quick and sometimes untidy, just the finished paintings.
It's hard to step out of the method you know and branch out, but I'm going to have a go. Soon.

For years I couldn't afford proper art supplies, and I painted on a horrible assortment of surfaces.

Both of these oils were done on thin cardboard that had been saved from writing pads and then gessoed. Hardly archival, and I don't expect they'll be around forever.
But I suspect that this 'making do' also had an effect on the way I saw my art, because I never finished anything properly, did lots of rough sketchy things and never had anything that I could really point to and be proud of.
I had three kids to bring up on my own, so I didn't beat myself up, just did the best I could under the circumstances. Now I find that I treasure these paintings that I did on scraps and leftovers, they speak to me of hard times when I was often overwhelmed by life, but somehow I never gave up on my art.

Now that my boys are mostly independant I'm enjoying treating myself to canvases and proper boards and some of the niceties of artistic life.The problem I have now is I'm trying to retain this sketchiness that I had earlier, and not 'finish' everything to death.But the main thing is to have time to devote to the work, and I still wrestle with that some days!

I painted this little oil without any preliminairy drawing, as an exercise.

I like doing this in watercolours as well, (sort of like using pen for drawing), as a way of making me really look at what I see and try to get it right first time.

Of course with oils you can make corrections fairly easily, but it still gives me a sense of daring when I start without a pencil guide. Perhaps this is my version of being a "Thrill Seeker".

The horse isn't perfectly in proportion, but I like that little highlight on his belly. There's usually some detail in every painting, no ,matter how bad, that comes out right.