Making use of One's art work...

We all make these paintings and they pile up one, by one, especially those of us who do demos for classes we teach. Each year I work with my students to come  up with an image they can use for their holiday greeting cards. This year, the painting was inspired by one of my good friends, Colonel Max Hegler, retired, US Airforce. He and his wife went on a trip to someplace back east and posted this wonderful image of Max enjoying his lobster dinner. I just knew I wanted to paint it, but originally not as Santa. This is a good example of using our refernece materials as jumping off point for our work. This guy looks like Santa, but not a lot like Max, and intentionally so...but the work was inspired by Max just the same. As I said in yesterday's post that we are all too involved in making the painting look like the photo!

Ok..I am off the track here. The intention of this blog today is to share with you some things that my students came to class with yesterday. Two of them made lovely calendars out of the images that they painted through out the year to give as gifts for their family members and brought them to share. What a lovely idea and they turned out so nicely!  Such a wonderful way to share something you love to do with the ones you care most about! I have always encouraged the students to find ways to use their art work, be it as greeting cards to send to people as thank you's or pick me ups for those who are sick. With the computer and printers we have these days, the images we can reproduce are sometimes hardly distinquishable from the original. Bookmarks, cook books, greeting cards, t-shirts..any number of things can be done with the art work we create. Different designs can be achieved by cropping the images as well. One need not use the whole image but part to make an interesting design come to life.
I am proud of my gals in my Tuesday morning Watercolor class for the paintings they create, and their efforts to share their work with others. Good Job Gals, Keep up the good work!

Painting classes will be resuming after the holidays in my Temecula Studio mid Jan. Be sure to keep an eye out on my website for updates. http://www.gabrielebaberart.com/