Red onion cloud

I divided my week so that every day I get to paint a different exercise; life drawing, plein air, illustration etc...  Fridays are my still life painting days and I started with this onion. It turned out a bit too tightly rendered  for my taste. Next week I'll paint it again, but with more painterly strokes.

Sundays are illustration days. One of my favorite things to paint are clouds. I often imagine them as mountains, big, strong and immovable. 

High Park

I painted this piece right at the entrance of High Park. I have been seeing this sunset view for some time and always kept saying that it would be nice to paint it. Well, I did it now. Forgot to sign it so I did it in Photoshop...

Also, my very talented friend and colleague Matt Lyon started a blog and I urge you to check his work out. His link is embedded on the right side under "Links" as well.

Summer leftovers

This was my first summer of painting plein air. I have learned a lot, and made lots of mistakes along the way. Comforting thought is to know that this is just a start and it will get better in the future, or so I tell myself. Here are some  pieces from this summer.

High Park, Grenadier pond. It was early morning and a soft raking light was moving across the pond, an elderly gentleman stopped behind me and stood there for some time staring at me. I turned around to say hello, but he just grunted disapprovingly and left. 

Kelso Park, it was a long weekend, so my wife and my brother Danijel  made it in to a picnic. It was a busy, crowded and noisy place, but Danijel's bbq and Mihaela's desert made it all better.

This is more of an imagination exercise that I have been trying to do more of...

Hedgehog and Porcini mushroom

When I was a kid, we would often find hedgehogs running through our yard; they were on one hand shy but not necessarily afraid of humans. When you get close to them they curl up into a ball, protecting themselves completely.
Dad being the prankster that he was, taught us a trick that foxes use when hunting hedgehogs: if you pee on them, they open up and run. I did not see anything wrong having fun with them in that way, but thinking about it now.... So wrong, lol..... This one goes out to my sister, Dijana :)

For Tea