A Young Fisherman

I met this boy a couple years ago when I was staying at Lakeside. I was out on the dock when he caught a fish and I asked him if I could take a picture of him with it. It's not a large fish, probably a perch, but he didn't care. He reeled in several more while I watched the sun set over the lake.

Ask People to Pose

If you need good reference material you must ask people to pose. The worst thing they can do is refuse and you've lost nothing if that happens. If you're shy--get over it.

As a teenager, I was very shy and it was difficult for me to make eye contact with strangers, let alone speak to them. As I moved into my twenties and entered the corporate workplace this attitude had to disappear, especially when every job I had seemed to involve sales of one kind or another. My fear of strangers is long gone and that has come in handy when I am out photographing reference material.

Last year a boy was fishing on the dock while I was out painting one evening. He was pleased and somewhat flattered when I asked him to pose with his fishing pole in hand. When you take the time to explain why you want to take a picture and that the subject just might end up in a painting, most people are eager to help. I kept this painting generic enough that a viewer can't really tell who the model is, unless perhaps the viewer is his mother. :)

Last weekend I took hundreds of invaluable reference photos. I used my charm, my wit and this well-rehearsed question: "Would you mind posing for a photograph? I'm an artist and I would love to put you into one of my paintings?" I was at a fitness exposition, surrounded by thousands of interesting individuals and my utter lack of shyness allowed me to take dozens of reference photographs.

Dockside Fisherman

A Plein Air Weekend

I spent a long weekend at the annual Lakeside Wooden Boat Show and Plein Air Festival. After a week of 100 degree heat the temperatures fell on Friday and I was wearing a jacket when I arrived at the gate Friday morning. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds in the afternoon and the jacket came off. Our final day was a breezy but warm Sunday, when the artists were invited to participate in a wet paint sale at the the park.

Jim White and I had decided we would kill some time by drawing people for free prior to the art sale, so we set up our easels and had some fun. Most of our clients were people who worked for Lakeside or children, but we didn't mind. The wind nearly took my paper with it a few times, yet every one seemed happy with their drawings. At least the price was right!

Here's Jim, doing his Sargent imitation.

Here's another friend of mine, Richard Maxfield, who's trying to sell some paintings. Or maybe he's just trying to explain his own unique creative process to them.

After the sale a friend and I took a dip in Lake Erie and THAT was extremely refreshing after being outside in the warm July sun all afternoon.

Here's a picture of my favorite subject from the weekend. I stayed with a great family and I asked one of the boys to pose with his rod and reel at dusk. I thought he would just stand on the dock and toss the line in once in awhile. Instead, he used real worms and he had a bite within minutes. It became an exercise in futility to paint him. The fish, a sheephead, according to my model, was reeled in after a few minutes of drama and it was a big, fat one! Unfortunately, the line broke and the fish swam away with the hook, which resulted in an interesting story about the actual size of the fish when he told his cousin about it later that night. It was getting dark so I took a few pictures, roughed the sketch in and finished it in the morning.

The Fishing Story

16" x 16"

SOLD