I had another great year at the Fall Foliage Festival last weekend. Since the show takes place minutes from my hometown, I get to see my family and friends and my wife and I get a little extra help getting everything together for the weekend’s festivities.

I spent Thursday night preparing roughly 50 paintings for the 3-hour voyage and loaded the car early Friday morning. That evening, the rain cleared long enough to set-up my tent. To my surprise, I got a new location this year and I was in the good company of several amazing local artists! By Saturday morning, it was raining hard and the task of unloading my artwork in a downpour with newsprint wrapped around it seemed like a pain in my butt. It had to be done and in an hour it was hanging. We opened our tent and waited to see how the festival-goers would respond.

Throughout the two days, lots of interested people stopped by my booth. The feedback was positive and often times beyond kind. Because this event has a local draw, a lot of friends and family members showed up and I got to reconnect with those I hadn’t seen in a while. Even though it rained both days (just like last year), I managed to sell some paintings, which feels great! One sale that was unbelievable was to a really cool dude who, along with his girlfriend (who actually bought Over the Rainbow a few months back), came all the way from NC! That made my day and made me feel like what I am doing is valuable, which is priceless.

With my second year under my belt, I walk away feeling blessed and very lucky to be invited to participate. For the past week, I have rested and allowed my brain to take a break, but I am ready to get back at it.

During the madness of preparing for the show, I did happen to finish up several paintings. Home Grown and Bull Shit are two that are fairly straight forward and heavily influenced by sign painting. For both of these paintings I started by prepping my wooden panels and sketching out my design. Home Grown’s color palette is fairly typical for me and the dots around the bear are showing up in a lot of my recent work. As for Bull Shit, I really liked using the warm colors that are usually only accents in my paintings. I finished this one by running my palm sander over it. I have to say that was really refreshing for me! This painting feels like velvet now and I dig the old distressed look of it. Both of these artworks got a lot of comments at the festival and Bull Shit definitely got the most laughs.