Happy New Year

In with the new, I'll be finishing this gorgeous painting soon. The beautiful glowing colors of the fall gets my wheels spinning as an artist. The colors are so beautiful and bold that I want to capture them on canvas. Fall is such a beautiful season, but the bold glowing colors seem to fade away all to soon. Now, this beautiful yellow glowing tree is almost completely finished and captured forever.

Unfortunately with a couple of bouts of rough colds set me back on top of holiday festivities with my two young children. I managed to get one painting session in over their two week break. One more session should do the trick. You will be amazed at how far this has come along and how much it's come to life just since this picture was taken. 

2013 in Review

As 2013 comes to a close, I'd like to step back and take a review of this year and what is in store for next year.   

Lately I found myself pulled away from my painting due to holiday festivities, a crashed computer, file loss and fighting off a few bouts of colds which left me with too little new material to update, so I decided this would be a good time to review and show you some of my works from this year. 

Most of these are available on my Fine Art America page http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/tina+a+stoffel/all, but a couple of them were just experiments. I enjoyed painting every single one of these so much that time would just slip away. 

As a full time Mom of two young boys and just beginning in this field (at least the painting part) this was all I could crank out for this year. My goal next year is to obviously continue to improve, pick up my speed, do more sketching (especially when painting time is limited) and more paintings. Currently I have 3 commissioned requests.

This weekend I plan to hit the easel to finish a fall painting I started then it's off to the commission work and a little something special I have planned for a special friend going through some tough life challenges. Keep checking back for updates. 

Meanwhile, as the current year closes and a new one approaches, I'd like to remind you this is a good time to back up  your important files in more than one place so you don't lose them as I did recently from my back up drive. Lat but not least, I'd like to wish you and your loved ones a wonderful, healthy and happy New Year. 

Speed Sketching and Some of My Paintings

Here are some of my paintings

I'm planning to add many more. Keep checking in.

Th topic on my mind this week is Speed Sketching, I had a conversation with two artists this week about speed sketching. Also, this technique was part of some coursework I took at Herron School of Art. I confess, I got away from it, but definitely plan to work this back into my schedule.

Here are a few helpful links I found on the topic:
Rapid/Speed Drawing Exercises

Artist Daily currently has a free e-book offer on this topic. Check it out here:
Artist Daily Sketching

Your Art, Files, and Safety

Do you have photos of your work stored in files? Do have a safe backup method? I thought I did, but after about 6 weeks of attempting to fix a computer that is still under warranty, I managed to get it back only to find my new Terabyte external back up did not transfer.

What do you do when your backup drive fails? Would you go to the manufacturer and haggle it out, or go to a computer tech who may be able to recover all or some of your files?

Having your files backed up in more than one place is the best bet. Ultimately a cloud storage, as I found out the hard way is the best option. The reason I hadn't done this before is security concerns, but according to my technician and the cloud back up claims, they are safer than your bank account.

One last tip today on storage, a professional technician stated the larger the external back-up drive, the more problems they have.

Take it from me, cloud storage is a small price to pay compared to possibly losing your precious data.

Canvas Talk: Holidays and Painting

Canvas Talk: Holidays and Painting: Many people will be celebrating holidays over the next couple of months with festivities such as parties, dinners, and gifts, and gatherings...