Brande Arno Art

The finished "Hay Maze"  Piglet Art I truly love how this piece came out.  I've been amazed at the pure color and beautiful brushwork of Angela Moulton's paintings. Every time I see her latest collection on YouTube, I am awestruck at how pure the background color is.  So I wanted to try my hand at upping background color value in my work.   Below is how I started: Hay Maze Start Here, I establish the main layout and gesture of this piglet's face.  I'm striving for something that looks painterly, yet would bring a smile to the face of the viewer, so this stage is important.  Also, color values on the pig are being set.   Hay Maze about halfway This is where I put that rich background color in.  Notice some neutral colors in with the bright.  I wouldn't want all bright green here as it would be like all caps when texting.  I'll re-post the final Hay Maze below: Lots of changes from the halfway point, ...

"Cocco" 4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard I have some news for those who subscribe and my collectors.  I'm moving back to Blogger.  It's been a long time and I tried another blogging venue.  It didn't work for me.  This artist has spent countless hours trying to get tech savvy.  I want to paint.  So stay tuned.  First post for 2017 coming shortly.

5 x 5 inches, Oil on Gessoboard I've painted this many times and every time I drive by the actual shack, I have to stop and look/take more pictures to work from.  It's hard to admit that one smaller shack could inspire me so much.

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard -  Click to Bid This piece was painted for the October Creatures of the Night, Nibblesfest Art Contest, or NFAC.  The bidding starts at just .99 cents and is through ebay.  Ends October 27.  Good luck!

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard  - $ 75. Purchase This being a foreshortened pose made it difficult to paint the depth.  Especially the cute face.  Had to set it just right on that cute fat little body. 

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard  $ 75.- Purchase When pondering what to paint today, another Berkshire piglet came to mind.  I love their markings and the challenge to paint black & white mixing my own blackish tones.  

5 x 5 inches, Oil on Gessoboard - $75.  Buy on Etsy Today, I planned to paint a shack.  I had an excellent start to the painting and was so happy.  Lasted about one hour.  I dug myself and the shack in a big hole. We couldn't crawl out so I had to scrape it all off. I wasn't going to give up on getting a painting, so I looked through my camera and found this little girl.  She was being a good girl at our local farmers market.   She was very friendly and pretty much posed for me.  I wish that I'd taken a minute back then to ask for and then write her name down on a piece of paper so I could lose that too. She had an ID bracelet on and I made it a little prettier than it really was.  Now, I didn't have to do that with her...she was pretty inside and out. 

5 x 5 inches, Oil on Gessoboard  Sold, Thank you I'm brushing up on my plein air skills to get ready for the annual Seneca Lake Plein Air Festival.  The artists arrive at headquarters, which is The Smith Center for the Arts, on Wednesday, September 30.  We paint outdoors on Thursday and Friday.  On Saturday evening is a gala show and sale.   I'm a charter artist and I love this event.  A link for complete details is  Smith Arts In the western part of NY, the weather has been heavenly.  The sun is casting wonderful shadows and the sky is a beautiful shade of blue with clouds that tempt me to just paint them.  In spite of the perfect painting environment, I still had trouble finding a subject to paint.  Mostly due to dangerous parking on the side of busy roads. Below is were I finally decided to paint: Not the best picture, but you get the idea.  Next is how I started: And like always, I didn't snap photos...

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard - NFAC - Sold Nibblefest Art Contest Starting September, 20, 2015  I totally enjoyed painting this piece.  Nibblefest has a dragonfly theme for September and what better reason for the artist license to come out of hiding?  Like all Nibblefest auctions on ebay, the bidding starts at just 99 cents.  The link will go live at 12 noon EST, 9/20/2015

6 x 6 inches, Oil on Gessoboard Sold I really loosened up with mixing and applying the greens in this piece.  

6 x 6 inches, Oil on Gessoboard Sold - Thank You! Still have the cuteness bug running the studio.  I may never get serious again.  I love cute animals and  I think piglets are second only to puppies in the cuteness scale.  Really enjoyed painting this piglet.

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard  Sold - Thank you! Was in the mood to paint something cute today. 

5 x 7 inches, Oil on Gessoboard Donated to Bethany House Sunflowers.  When in full bloom, its hard to believe they start from small seeds.  About 5 minutes from my house is the little village of East Bloomfield where, talented green thumbs who know how to make the most of a quarter acre live.   On these quarter acres, you'll find small sunflower patches as backdrops to colorful flowerbeds or lining the sidewalk leading to the porch, or even horseshoeing the rural-route mailboxes. Stunning and much inspiration for this artist.  

8 x 8 inches, Oil on Gessoboard A few weeks ago, while driving from point A to point B,  I was blessed by a stunning view of a field of simple wildflowers.  Perhaps it was the contrast of the rich dark woods behind the field, or maybe it was the aged texture of the fence posts, or maybe the vast amount of Queen Anne's Lace reminded me of early snow.   I pulled over and took a few pictures. Today, I composed this painting from the pictures.  The composition is simple, but the rich contrast, the aged fence posts and the snow blanket of Queen Anne's Lace all live peacefully in this painting.  

8 x 8 inches, Oil on Gessoboard- Sold There is something good and wholesome to work a field and harvest hay and wheat.  Humans get sustenance from the bread made with wheat.  Farmers feed the hay to horses and other barn animals.  I remember working the field on a wagon behind the baling machine. Pulling up the fresh bales and dragging them behind me, so the adult could lift and stack them in rows.  Good hard work that gave me an appetite.  I was a skinny kid, so having an appetite for supper was a rare occurrence. I painted this field with the bales nestled in, still part of the field.  I drove by the field recently and the bales are gone.  Stubble of hay remain with the job to protect and feed the soil during our winter season.  And in March, while it is still cold enough to keep me inside, the farmer of this field will be turning the stubble back into the ground. The soil will be laid bare and warmed to make ready for the spring so...

5 x 5 inches, Oil on Gessoboard $ 75. Website Purchase When the weather gets cold, I set up bird feeders and watch how the chickadees do their day's work.   They seem to know that the other birdies of the neighborhood also need to get to the feeder because they take a seed and then fly to a branch to eat it.  Sometimes, they have to wait longer than they should for another turn because the finches like to park at the perch to make piggies of themselves.

4 x 4 inches - NFAC Nibblefest Art Contest Sold This little piece was painted today for the Nibblefest Art Contest and like always, starts on the 20th of the month and bidding starts at only .99 cents.  I probably over did it eating tea biscuits while painting this.

4 x 4 inches, Oil on Gessoboard Click for Purchase This painting was a personal challenge for me.  The challenge was to make every stroke of my palette knife and brush count and that means thinking before painting.  I was hoping that I'd get through the entire painting without any scrapes, but that didn't happen.  However, the amount of scrapes was greatly reduced, so I'm happy.  I also continued with my exploration of mixing browns from Yellow, Red and Blue.

12 x 16 inches, Oil on Gessoboard, - Sold My good friend and I were on our way to a grocery shopping trip when she spied this hay field.  The freshly bundled hay bales announcing a hard day of work for a local farmer.  I asked her to pull over so I could get a few pictures. She not only pulled over, but she wanted to commission me to do a painting of said field.  I enjoyed every minute of this painting.  The bales are more stagnant in real life, so I had to change that up a bit for the composition's sake.  My friend is rather literal, so I didn't have as much creative license in the composition area.  But I had fun with mixing color and brushwork, which I think comes through in this piece.

6 x 6 inches, Oil on Gessoboard $ 95.  For Purchase The inspiration for this painting comes from the Daily Paintwork's cow challenge.  I went to Morgue File and got a wonderful photo reference to work from.   I hoped to capture the heifer's muscles and still keep the brushwork fluid.  But this painting needed more, it needed richer browns than I could mix with my favorite tube brown.   So I mixed my own from a red, blue and yellow.