Linda Mahoney Art

This doesn't look like anything more than a bunch of squiggles, right? When you look up close, even the most realistic renderings can look very abstract. I have to remind myself, as I do my students, to "draw what you see, not what you think you know". We all develop some kind of preconceived ideas of how things should look from a very early age. To accurately reproduce what we see, it is helpful to shift away from naming the object or thinking about what it is. Focusing in on small areas and duplicating what we see rather than what it is helps to make the shift.  This is a small area - about 4" square from a 16 x 22 image. It's  Prismacolor pencil on Stonehenge paper .  I hope to finish it within the next couple of weeks and will share the whole image here.

Have you missed me? I have been busy, busy, busy doing illustrations recently. It is fun, but a LOT of work and I have been putting in long hours. Part of that is my own tendency toward perfectionism. One of the most fun jobs I have been working on is a children's book about a frog who lives in the bayou of Louisiana and dreams of being a princess. I have made a new friend with the author and am stretching my skills back to illustration which is where I started as a professional artist many years ago. So many things have changed since then with the arrival of computers in the world of art and they continue to expand. The Photoshop images that were state of the art a few years ago are giving way to Vector images which can be resized without distortion. I still start all my illustrations with hand drawn images, and I am hoping there will always be a place for that. There is just something about the feel of the artist's hand in that artwork compared to digitally created work. Mayb...