Exciting News! Jewelry

This is my first design completed from my new precious metal jewelry collection. As with my bronze sculptures this is the lost wax method and all pieces are hand crafted from start to finish. "Lovely" the Afghan Hound, is available in silver, gold and bronze. Shown here in silver with an antique finish. You have your choice of a pendant, broach, lapel pin or tie tac. This particular piece is 1 1/2 inch by 1 inch. Looking forward to hearing your comments. More designs will be available soon and I will be sure to share them with you on my blog and they will be available for purchase soon on my website (http://www.terrydchacon.com/). Special orders are being taken now.

Until next time, Enjoy the ART! Terry d. Chacon

any questions be sure to email me at: shacone@aol.com

Painting Laguna Beach 2009

Painting Laguna Beach. My fellow painter Pat Ford and I arrived around 9:30 in the morning at Heisler Park. A very well know park adjacent to the beautiful beaches around Laguna. We unfortunately got to talking on the drive down and I turned off too quickly so it took us a little longer to get there than what we had anticipated. The big problem with painting in Laguna is the darn parking meters. $2.00 an hour to park which can really add up by the end of the day. Luckily both Pat and I had robbed our quarter banks the night before and had plenty of quarters for the day. We walked around the park and low and behold they had a painting class going on in our spot, so we had to find an alternative. This particular spot overlooks a nice bluff and beach below, the other spot is looking in the same direction but there is this beautiful bougainvillea that is rich in color and really adds to the painting. I will go back and paint that scene next time. I chose the scene I painted as I liked the deep rich shadows on the bluff and the distant mountains that surround the ocean and make up Laguna Beach.

"Morning at Laguna"

After painting a couple hours in the morning we packed up our gear and headed to the Laguna Art's Festival. Festival of Arts - Pageant of the Masters Home The OFFICIAL Place To Purchase Pageant of the Masters Tickets Be sure to go to this website and see all the festivities going on.

We had a wonderful lunch with Margarita's and looked through both the Art Affair and the Festival of Arts. The Art Affair is for any artist and the Festival of Arts is for only Laguna Beach resident artists. Both have some really beautiful art and a must see for anyone in the area. The festival is up until August 31. One treat we had while visiting the Festival of Arts was we ran into Michael Obermeyer who is one of the artist displaying some of his lovely plein air works. As always he was very gracious and talked with us about art and Laguna. Michael is in one of my previous blog posts. He came and gave a workshop for PAAR this past spring. He is such a delight and a wonderful plein air artist.

We then headed back to the beach for a late afternoon painting.
I loved this scene once we found it. The beautiful bluff and the sun was starting to go down behind it so it made for a beautiful back lit scene. When I started the painting there were a few beach loungers on the beach below, but by the time I ended they had gone away. I would have loved to have put some of them in. Oh well, maybe next time. The water was so bright at this time that my eyes were watering trying to paint the scene. I was quite surprised this morning when I got my painting out to take a look that I had really captured the glisten on the water, even though I was painting through teary eyes. It was around 7 pm when we finished up. Still a bit early to head back home because of the traffic so we went out for a wonderful Italian dinner, talked about the wonderful day we had experienced and then headed home.

I hope you have enjoyed my painting day in Laguna and are enjoying the paintings. All paintings are for sale either through me or in an upcoming exhibit. Giclee prints and note cards are also available. They make wonderful presents.

Please share my blog with your friends and family.

Until next time, ENJOY THE ART! Terry d. Chacon

Gail Wright-

"Terry, I just got your blog. I had your pictures from today up on my computer screen. I walked away and back, they looked magical, just really mesmerizing. These are beautiful."

Lee Ann Smith-Trafzer-

"I can't believe how your plein aire has progressed, Terry. These are just beautiful! And a style all your own! Bravo!"

The Boys!

"The Boys" is a painting that I did today. The stars in the painting are "Apache" (Ch. Abaca ShaCone Native Spirit) and "Chief" (Ch. Abaca ShaCone Free Spirit). Abbe and I bred these 2 boys along with Pam and Lonnie Patterson. They have both done very well at the dog shows. They are both group winners and Apache is now a Specialty Best in Show Dog, winning the Portland Afghan Hound Specialty last month shown by Heather Lindberg. These boys have just begun their show careers and both Abbe and I are really excited with their progress.

I wanted to share with you my approach to this painting. The first step of course was to draw the boys onto the canvas. ( I did not get a photo of this) I used a reference photo taken by Christopher Broughten. The photo was taken in Santa Barbara late in the day and was a little foggy, except where the light was hitting the dogs in the front. A wonderful composition, thank you Chris! I really wanted to capture the beauty of these two dogs. I proceeded to block in the shapes of color to make a very abstract looking painting. Putting cool colors in shadows and warm colors where the light hit the dogs. (See below)



The second stage was to make sure the values were correct by adding either cool colors to the warm areas or warm colors to the cool areas until they started to read correctly. I also wanted to make sure I used different colors on the dogs as they are different in life. Even though there is really no landscape here I wanted to give that impression by showing some atmosphere in the painting. I also wanted the brightest, lightest and the most contrast part of the painting to stay with the front portion of the dogs.

The third step was to start adding colors to the different shapes to start making the dogs look 3 dimensional. I wanted to make the colors sing in the front and have less importance in the back.


The forth and final step was to add the details, but not too much. I want to suggest to the viewer that these are afghan hounds not describe. The painting was done with a brush in the beginning and finishing with a palate knife. I love the texture the palate knife gives a painting.



This is the finished piece so you don't have to scroll back to the top of this blog.

I hope you have enjoyed this step by step approach to my painting. Looking forward to hearing your comments. I will be making giclee prints and note cards from this painting. Please contact me to place your order. As with all of my blogs I really appreciate your dedication and hope that you will share them with your family and friends. You too can have your pets immortalized by Terry. Until next time, ENJOY THE ART!

Terry d. Chacon
shacone@aol.com

"Grazing for Foal"

It's a virtual party. Kim Santini and Linda Shantz are having a party. They have invited artist to participate and join in the fun. Kim took a wonderful photo of a mare in a pasture just days before having her foal and asked artist to paint their interpretations. You have 24 hours to complete your painting.

Using the palate knife and a 6 x 8 inch canvas board I started my creation. First I divided the photo into 5 large masses. If it was in shadow, I used cool colors, if it was in sunlight I used warm colors. I actually took photos from each step and accidentally deleted them from my camera. "sigh" I promise to get photos next time so you can see the process.

After once over the whole canvas with 5 different masses in 5 different colors I proceeded to refine the masses asking myself is this mass warmer or cooler than this mass and changing as I went by adding either cool or warm colors to the mass. I wanted to start giving atmosphere to the painting during this step. I would have loved to have been on location to paint this scene rather than use a reference photo, but I don't think I can go painting in Minnesota where Kim lives to do so.

After completing the 5 masses again I started refining each mass. Each mass was again refined to start the process of giving form to the subject 3D, making sure each plane change was a different color and adding bands of color to each mass. After all this I added the final details, pulling the painting together.

This painting took me approximately 2 hours to complete. I will submit it to the Virtual Party and let you know how you can see the different variations each artist has submitted.

This painting is available for $250.00, prints and notecards will also be available. shacone@aol.co Until next time, ENJOY THE ART. Terry d. Chacon