Original Art Available & Art Show Entries

I had a small brainstorm last night and set up an album on my Facebook fan page where you can see which original drawings or paintings I have available. With the exception of a few works (mostly ACEOs and a couple of larger pieces) my originals are in the album. In the description for each image is a link to a web page with more details. It finally dawned on me that this would be a convenient way to corral all my originals in one place.

In other news, I've been working on a couple of pieces to submit to the "Art at the Classic" art show to be held in conjunction with the Draft Horse Classic (DHC) in September. The first piece is this photo board of a draft horse, that I titled "Taking a Break". Of course, the photo was taken at a previous DHC. I cleaned up the photo in Photoshop and ran it through a few gyrations and the "poster edges" filter to come up with the final. I mount the photo on a board, take a Dremel to the edges and then paint the roughed-up edges with India ink. I spray that with an archival UV sealer and then coat the surface with 3 layers of acrylic gloss medium.

Below on the left, is the photo, as shot, before any corrections. On the right is the photo with some edits - most notably, the light and beam in the upper left are gone and I've tweaked the contrast. From that point, I make additional layers of the image using different effects on each layer to get the final image as shown above.

Usually, I just put a hanger on the back of the photo board and it's good to go, but I mounted this one to another board (that I painted with India ink) and dropped that in a frame. The board is 6" x 6" and the frame is 8" x 8".

The other piece I want to submit is this 5" x 3" scratchboard drawing of a miniature horse foal. I've made a great deal more progress on it since this scan and I think I can get it done in time to meet the July 1 postmark deadline! I guess I should get back to work on it . . .