Don’t let my Instagram feed fool you, I painted this very quickly. There was just a lot of time between each session and a lot of reluctance to sit down to work on it. The hardest part of this painting was sitting down to make it happen. Once I was there, paintbrush in hand it was easy, but getting there… ugh. Does anyone else have trouble starting up a session?

It was nice to paint something different, but I have a feeling that no matter what fruit or vegetable I’m painting, this series of 30 still lifes is going to get harder. Not the paintings themselves, they will likely continue to get easier. Since I’m getting better and faster at painting. Apart from one, I’ve finished a painting a week since part way through January. The first paintings were easy to finish because I was excited to sit down and work on them. The last apple I painted was difficult to get through and I kept finding other things to do than to work on these carrots.

I have several other paintings in the works that are unrelated to the still life series that I work on for a change of pace. They will be featured on the blog as I finish them. I love seeing the improvements I’m making from painting often, but it can be very challenging sometimes. I’m in awe of the daily painters of the world.

For my last post about photography, I dug up some old photographs from high school and college. With those photos I found some of my early paintings. I’ve definitely come a long way. The pink still life was really my first painting. It’s done in acrylics and I remember hating it the whole time. I feel like it turned out really well considering. It didn’t leave me with any desire to pursue painting though. The still life with the blue bottles is one of my early oil paintings from college when I was beginning to like painting. It looks unfinished and overworked at the same time. It had potential, but I really did something weird with the background and it’s a little out of focus in general. It can be good to look back just to see how far you’ve come.