BACK HOME AGAIN IN INDIANA

This 15 x 11" painting could have been painted much bigger and on YUPO. It was finished just before I had my left knee replaced two days ago. The next painting will be of wine bottles.

During my classes' Christmas parties, I usually paint demos for them as entertainment of sorts. Last week, Thursday night's class wanted to see how to paint glass, so this is what caught my eye to paint. The photo was taken a couple of summers ago at Lynne and Jamie's house on the lake and shows the wonderful shapes of their window reflections in several areas on the bottles.

Painting glass is really so very easy. It's all about the shapes and value changes on the surface of the glass container. Creating the right edge with the correct value on each shape on the glass will get you there every time. It's almost like paint by number. The hard part is to NOT paint the glass bottles, but to just paint the shapes on them, with the right edges, the right values. You never really paint the bottle, only the shapes on it. Hope that makes some kind of sense:-)

Update: Surgery went incredibly well, and we were back home 35 hours later. This morning while making my way over to the computer with coffee in hand, I dragged the walker with my other hand. I guess I need the walker in order to be safe... and I do keep using it, but I can amazingly walk without it already. The hard part is taking it slow and easy. This surgery/recovery is just incredible, and I'm so very thankful for God's blessing of not having any pain today and recovering this fast. Dr. Michael Swank is an awesome surgeon, who warned me repeatedly that this total knee replacement would not go as well as my the one in August 'cause my body wasn't really totally ready for another surgery. But it's going even better! Thank you so much, God, and thank you, Dr. Swank.

"KASEY'S CACHE" Transparent Watercolor on 140# Fabriano Artistico 15 x 11" COLLECTED

ALL YUPO

Almost all my YUPO paintings are collected in one post here, together. They are more or less in chronological order, starting with the most recent all the way back to the ancient ones.

After they were time line organized, it was interesting to see the changes in color use, technique, and style. It's pretty obvious to see just when experimenting and trying new things happened. Almost two years ago, I was able to take a great workshop taught by YUPO master, George James, but before that, I was on my own to figure out ways of managing paint on this fantastically slick surface. Many times, the paint managed me instead.

Some are a lot better than others for sure, and the look of the most recent YUPOs - the 3 bird pictures - isn't one that I will stay with. Nevertheless, painting on this slick plastic is soooooooo much fun... brings out the six year old in me. Several of these have even won some nice awards.

A half a dozen of my YUPO paintings were never photographed - no record of them but in my memory. During my ten year span of painting on YUPO, there was about a two year time lapse when I did not even paint on YUPO at all. What was I thinking?

Almost all of these were painted with transparent watercolors, but a couple have gouache and regular acrylics on them too, even some acrylic ink. There are several recent ones which have been created using fluid acrylics to look like watercolor. Fluid acrylics and YUPO are my FAVORITE materials to make art with right now.

Two more YUPO paintings are in progress, to be posted when they are completed. One is a watercolor, and the other, a 26 x 40" sheet, is being painted, ever so slowly, with fluid acrylics. If you're an artist who likes to take workshops, check out the January YUPO workshop I'm offering - coming up the weekend before the Super Bowl - see the side bar on the right.

THE End of Sandy's YUPO paintings from the late '90's to 2009. Many more to come in the future!