I wanted this for Valentine's Day but it does not much matter as long as I use it for a deep winter month- like January or February. Maybe I will switch this with the January image and use the boy for February. (I had already started this when Randy pointed out that President's Day is in February!)

I plan to use people of all ages for these images. This and the previous one are predominantly blue and beige/brown tones. That was not deliberate. What is deliberate is that I am trying to restrict my color ranges to make them look 'simpler'.

My newsletter/ news magazine is almost finished. I am waiting on two captions. If I don't get them by the end of the day I will use different images. Shelley used to swear that I was the most creative when I worked on a newsletter. In a way, she may be right because I painted two pictures since I started my newsletter and my head is filled with images to paint. Painting this made me think about Shelley. I am a careless painter and that used to drive her crazy! I don't paint out little mistakes here and there and I will compose images without reference photos which sometimes ends up with slight limb distortions. Shelley does not stop until it is right. I stop when it looks ok. That does not mean that I don't go back later and change things. I probably changed three paintings this year- things that just drove me crazy when I looked at the painting. (The kind of thing Shelley would have fixed before she stopped!)