Happy New Year!

Oil on Gessobord. 5"x7"

Today is the first anniversary of this blog. The intent of keeping a blog was to journal my progress as a painter. My hope was to do a painting a day. I realized pretty quickly that posting a new painting every day was unrealistic for me, but the need to post something on the blog has helped me stay motivated to paint most days, if not every day.

I feel the constant practice has helped develop my painting skills. While I'm far from where I want to be, I think I've made some progress over the past year. Here's a painting of a coffee mug that I did in April. In comparing these two paintings, I can see that there has been some improvement.

While I'm pleased with the progress I've made, I still have a long way to go. I need to get better with color, value, line, and design. My resolution for 2012 is to become more disciplined in my practice. I also plan to include more drawing.

I'll continue to use this blog as my journal, posting observations along with my paintings. It will be interesting to see how things look in January 2013.

My warmest wishes for a Happy New Year!