Painting of an Eastern Fence Lizard | Lizzy

Description

The biodiversity here at Wild Ozark is one of my favorite things about living where we do. Even in my garden, there is always so many critters. Some are friendly, some are not. One of the friends of the garden is the Eastern Fence Lizard. This year has been a good year for them! Apparently there hasn’t been any hungry snakes in the usual hiding spots, because the lizards, skinks, and salamander have all been running amuck all year. I can always tell when a snake is in the garden because the lizards disappear.

Details about the Original Work

Title: Lizzy
Size: 8 x 4″
Media: handmade oils
Substrate: wood gesso board
Pigment source: soot, sandstone, magnetite, indigo, thyme lake, lapis, and titanium

A favorite critter

I love the Eastern Fence lizards. Recently lots of babies have hatched from eggs buried by the mother some time ago. They’re so cute with their big heads and tiny bodies. This painting is of a large female who had climbed up on a rock nearby while I was taking a break from helping my husband build our solar array.

Click here to see the progression from start to finish.

The Pigments

My paints are all handmade. Everything except white and blue are local pigments, and were foraged or grown here at Wild Ozark. These earthy colors lend themselves well to painting scenes of late summer and autumn, and most of the wildlife feature the same rust, browns, earthy yellows and blacks, too.

• sandstones in various shades (red, orange, brown, yellow, greenish, tan, purplish) all yield earthy tones
• soot for black
• garden thyme makes a lightfast yellow
• magnetite for brown
• indigo is a long-lasting blue
• lapis lazuli for blue
• titanium for white

The white (titanium dioxide) and blue (lapis lazuli) that I have to outsource arrive as powders that I make into paint.

Here’s a post at my main site about making gray paint from creek shale, if you’d like to get an inside view of that part of the process.