•Title: “Gazing at the night”
•Medium: Chinese Ink and Oil pastels on Wenzhou Chinese Paper
•Rationale: –A young girl is gazing at the moon, praying, hoping. It was a lonely night.

•Title: “Fat is condemned”
•Medium: Chinese Ink and Oil pastels on Chinese Paper •
•Rationale: –Blinded by the pursuit for beauty, our society is weight obsessed. Sitting there and pinching the rolls of “fat” on her tummy, Sarah felt depressed because she does not belong. She hated her looks, and was anxious over how others view her. She sat there splitting hair, almost to tears.

•Title: “Drunk Alone”
•Medium: Chinese Ink and Oil pastels on Chinese Paper •
•Rationale: –The man is vexed over work and is drinking heavily in the pub. While the pub, with all its colourful light, is a place of gaiety and entertainment, he felt cheerless.

Oil pastels on paper, small x small.

Sam likes to surf and by likes, I mean loves.

(His wetsuit rather makes him look like Batman in this picture, hee hee. )

Sam is able to decode the blatherings on various reports and figure out which days are going to be great for an early morning surf.  On those mornings we wake up around 4:30 a.m. and head out to Lido Beach (which I much prefer over dirty Rockaway) where Sam surfs and I enjoy a peaceful morning on the beach, watching the sunrise and observing the locals interact.

Yikes!

We both love these mornings but Sam enjoys them so much that he has asked me repeatedly to immortalize them by painting/drawing/sketching a picture of the beach for him.  He sent me several pictures of beach scenes that he hoped I would replicate for him but I held out.  There is something about drawing beach scenes that has always turned me off and up until recently I wouldn’t give in to this project.  Then one afternoon  I took this picture:

And from that, adapted this:

Different from the original I know but the idea is there.  The finished copy now hangs in Sam’s room, in a frame on a brand new shelf.  Success!

*Sidenote:  Surf season is over for now but we will be back out this summer when I will execute my plan of administering post-surf massages by a non-certified masseuse (me), 5 dollars for 5 minutes.  Can’t wait!

My 11th season of Blog posts is due to start on Monday January 25th 2010… and on Artwork Premiere Thursdays…

Snow White and Ariel will take center stage again – and there’ll be three drawings in all, one of which you’ll be able to personalize…

Cats will wander in to sun themselves in new some landscapes of Rhodes in Greece…

And as for the dogs, they’ll be visiting more of their wolf country cousins, as well as appearing in a new set called ‘Dreaming Dogs’

Thanks for reading this season, hope you’ll join me in January. Have a very Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, and why not follow me on twitter for sneak peeks, and just in case a few new drawings appear early, you never know!

Débuting today, some villas taking off into the sky over Amalfi, Italy. And to top off this fantasy imagery, the whole Italian town is drawn in an aggressive Fauvism style!
Fauvist artists first applied their paint straight from the tubes to create their expressive works at the start of the last century, in France. I’ve always been a little heavy handed with my oil pastels and think I’ve finally figured out perhaps I shouldn’t hold back and that this style, is kind of fun for me. And I hope you’ll have some fun owning ‘Flying Villas of Amalfi’!

CREATIVE THOUGHT – When the spark of creativity explodes into action………….

This is what I imagine is going on in my heart when the birth of a creative thought ignites every cell in the body into action

Click image to see it much larger

Many of you follow my Flickr feed and have already seen these, but I keep hoping I’ll get some new visitors here, so I’m posting work from the last 2 months.These are all going to be for sale – let me know if you’re interested.

Running out into my Dog Breed Cartoon Portraits art gallery wing are a Beagle, Yorkshire Terrier and Doberman Pinscher (below). And these pets all have a retro pink flavor.
The Doberman à la Pink is available as a numbered limited edition of only 12 in three versions as well as an ACEO, so don’t let this pastel color-coated canine get away!

After over 700 unique eBay Members’ feedback comments, I still pay close attention to what every one of my Buyers says after purchasing an art print through the douglasrickard eBay store. Here are some which made me smile from the past few months. ‘gped8306’ wrote about ‘Charcoal and Oil - Venice’:

“This is a beauty and so is Venice and so is the artist”

‘looseinthelilacs’ wrote about her ‘Charcoal Drawing - Pug

’:

“the little face is so precious…you can be very proud of yourself…thank you for sharing your art”

And ‘halfvastproductions’ wrote, after receiving an ACEO of ‘Story Lines - The Aristocats Characters’:

“Beautiful ACEO. Daughter confiscated it immediately.”

Louis

Chandler

 

Sarah

 

Caroline

click here to see the rest of Miss Haine’s class

I’m not happy with how the first piece came out, nor am I with the second,
but if I had to choose which one I finished more succesffully, I’d have to
say the second one.

It’s for Artfully Unforgotten, parsons did a collaboration with them and
the pieces we made will be auctioned on December 4th!

For more information either go to their main website, or here.

Good night!

lovelove* masuko a. jo

The kiddos always love to paint! This project helped us learn how to mix colors. Each student re-visited the primary colors and how to use them to mix the secondary colors. We also talked about warm and cool colors and how they compliment each other.

Each student spent some time collecting leaves and drawing them as realistic as possible. We painted the leaves with warm colors and then painted the background with cool colors. Some final details were added with oil pastels to really make the leaves pop off the page!

To see the rest of the class work click here

Here are two new additions to my Landscape Art online gallery and both of them have the wildest, most colorful skies!
To compliment ‘Maui’ another Hawaiian landscape drawing, ‘Oahu’ and the first in a possible series of sports artwork, the home of the Boston Red Sox, Fenway Park!

When I was a little boy I used to be fascinated by Disney animated films and after leaving school, went to art college. Unlike one friend whose strength was drawing comic book characters, I found that I couldn’t really draw people out of my head in various proportions without having the subject to draw from, in front of me. I stuck with color and texture and static shapes instead. Any distant dream of ever using my art talent for anything Disney disappeared.
And then, for a while, the prospect of even using my art talent at all looked faint, as I wound up working in retail in… a ‘Disney Store’. I used to be the collectibles specialist and learnt to appreciate the Walt Disney Classics Collection fine art sculpture series. And at the time that looked like the end of the story. But just over five years later, here I am displaying my own still-life studies of those same sculptures to Disney collectors at the October Castle China Fall WDCC Event in Warwick!

Spring is a whirlpool of activities — the butterflies are auspicious  sign of better times to come.