Poinsettia Horses

The first thing you'll notice about these is that I never paint both sides of an item the same way. It's more fun to just let the design flow and makes them much more interesting to look at. If you get bored looking at one side of it you can always flip it over and see something new.

 I did the top horse first and was either tired or a lot more relaxed by the time I started on the second one. There's quite a difference in my approach to the subject.

 A. side, horse # 1

B. side, horse #1

 A. side, horse # 2

B. side, horse #2

Painting Poinsettias

Dinosaurs

This isn't the sort of thing that I usually do but a friend asked me if I'd paint some ornaments to be used as gift tags on presents this season.

 I wanted to keep things fairly simple so she could write whatever she wanted to on them.

 1.Use a dark green base coat
 2. Sponge several shades of greens , gold and brown over that
    to give the feeling and general look of a dinosaur.

Finished Eagle Ornaments

Teaching myself to paint eagles is going to take a lot more practice but I think the early results are encouraging and I find it an interesting challenge to see what happens when I try painting this design on different sizes and shapes of ornaments...other ideas come to mind like small boxes, furniture or cabinet doors...

Big Eagle ornament step by step

1.Carve, sand and base coat your wooden ornament

                                     2.Paint a simple sky in blue and white

 3.Begin painting your trees in which ever technique you prefer.

 a. the dark green goes on first!

4. Add highlights in a lighter green

       5.Double load a liner brush with brown and white to add peeks of the tree trunks

               6. Follow a photo and do your best to add an eagle. (I'm just figuring out how to do it myself but as soon as I can teach myself I'll do my best to show you.)

Big sky country wooden horse

I'm still making a few "Thank You" gifts and since this one is for a guy I decided painting a small landscape on it would be nice. Here's where I'm at with it so far:

I'll add more photos as the work progresses.

Laying in the framework for the trees

The big finish: filling in the branches and adding some grass

Daffodil Horse

 Front

Back

I'm making a Christmas ornament out of this one 

for a "thank you" gift for someone special that's helped us out a lot 

Boxed set of ornaments

I've got 2 finished horses to clear coat this morning and 2 more to finish painting today then depending on whether or not the finish filling the box I may have to carve and paint some more. I was hoping that one dozen would do the job but now I'm not quite so sure.