Moose.......

This is another older painting that I made of a moose in Minnesota.  It was created in oil pastel. The shoreline in the background is a depiction of what I could see everyday on Lake Pokegama, near Grand Rapids, Minnesota.  The rest of the scene in the foreground reminds me of the old Hamm's Beer commercial that one use to see on tv.  The land of sky blue water can be found in Minnesota in the summertime.

Cripple Creek, Colorado.......

This is an oil pastel of an old abandoned building near Cripple Creek, Colorado.  It is an old silver mining town up in the mountains.  When you take a train ride to see some of the mining areas there is this shed left from the past mining era.  Oil pastel is a fun medium to use as it is painting with sticks of oil pigments.  I sometimes thought it must have been like painting with a tube of lipstick by the way it would rub onto the painting surface. You can blend colors easily right on the surface as it is an open material for quite some time.

A garden view......

I painted this in oils early in my painting career.  It has some unusual trees that remind me of Grant Woods trees in his landscapes.  I was of course inspired by Monet's garden and paintings.  It is a large painting that I painted during the summer of 1990.

Boats.....

When I had first started painting I looked through magazines for ideas in which to paint. This was a photo in the National Geographic magazine.  I liked all the over lapping shapes and the colors in the water.

Grand Portage, Minnesota.......

Another older painting to share with  you today.  I painted this in the summer of 1992 in oils.  The scene is a large opening overlooking Lake Superior.  The tepee was there but the rest came from imagination. 

Grand Portage is one of the last towns at the top of Minnesota on the North Shore.  It is Indian Reservation Territory and there is a recreated structure of the actual fort or trading post that sat there.  The mountains to the left are sitting on a projection of land that helps to make that curved shape of the states form.

I won't critique my own work with this one, but as an art teacher I can see that I have three different paintings that could have been cropped out of this painting.

I find myself evaluating my older work to help me to improve on my work. Composition is important and in each of the three cropped photos you can see different things take on  different importance.  It may be the tepee, or the tree, or the sky itself. In many ways the foreground of the original work could have been deleted and the painting could have been painted on the horizontal.

The addition of a sea gull would help any balance problems created by cropping.  I will leave it all alone and maybe I can start a new painting perfecting the painting that was done 18 years ago.

Computer Design.............

As a computer graphics design instructor,  I had to develop creative projects that encouraged student to learn the different tools of a design program.  This quilt design is actually two captured squares from a photo of a hot air balloon.  The two shapes were cut and pasted into this quilt design.  I have a lot of different creations of mine I will share as I get them downloaded.  They are archived on CDs.

The lost farm..........

This is a watercolor I painted a few years back as a commission.  The farm belonged to my client's family and it was destroyed for the making of a lake here in Iowa.  The land itself became a waterway and is not under water today.  As an artist one tends to paint tightly to depict all the details that the person wants, more that to make a painterly work.  I painted in the tractor and the old family car to  make sure they could identify with the place.  In reality I am sure the buildings were not well painted and the house probably needed a coat of paint.

My Rooster, first and only one.............

Chickens have become a popular theme for decoration on all sorts of domestic items.  I think the fad has been around for over 15 years now. I really like some of the painted platters with roosters as  the design. 
Back in 1994 I tried my hand at doing a rooster from a photo using pastel pencils.  The actual artwork is a lot weathered as it has been at school with me for quite some time and it has been squeezed in a file which rubs some of the pastel around.  I think I should sit down and give it a reviving in texture and clear color.
When I was a kid we had only white chickens.  One year I asked my mom why we didn't have a rooster and she said we would save one back.  That meant that when she bought her 150 boiler chickens to raise from chicks in the spring, she would butcher all of them but one.  This was the time when they had not hybridized them so much that they did have definite traits of being either a hen or rooster. 
That rooster was a terrorists as he protected his hens and would try to gouge me with is talens which were large and were very sharp.  Hens were never threatening but this guy protected his flock.  I am sure one day in the fall while I was at school my mom had dad take off his head and we eventually ate him.  The parents were good about eating things that got to be sick or a nuisance.
I would like to venture into drawing roosters and rabbits, different kinds of small animals.  Being a farm boy at heart I could even stand to paint a pig or two. 
I thought I would share this oldie with you again until I get free to start again to do fresh new artwork. Thanks for stopping by at my artspot.