MattsmithMakes

Thrilled that I get to participate in the coolest show around again!

We are thrilled to welcome new and returning fine art artisans to the 2026 FestivALL Capitol Street Art Fair, May 30-31!

🎉Participating Fine Art Artisans:
Bashful Bee Press
Cali Wesson Artwork
Corrissa Flesher Art & Designs
HepCatz Design
John Wirts Art
Juyeoun Kim Art
Marisamade
MattsmithMakess
Melissa Doty Artwork
Meredith Young
Sadie Valzetta Studio

Join us on Capitol Street in Downtown Charleston, WV for this favorite FestivALL event for two days of art, live music, entertainment, and more!

Alright folks here’s the last batch of paintings from this years (finally successful) !! I’ll do a rundown for some details on each one but I just wanna say that this little endeavor has really brought me back. I had a really tough winter mentally and wasn’t feeling like myself. Returning to The Practice has filled my heart up so much and I feel like I am finally getting some momentum with this thing.

- 1. Blue swing, gouache on illustration board. This one took me a long time but I’m really happy with how it came out. The house next door really does have this old swingset and in the evening the sun hits the middle blue swing and it’s just the best. Been wanting to take a run at this one for a while.
- 2. My Perfect Cake Part 2. A while back I painted a slice of my birthday cake from a few years ago. A close friend bought it and wanted a companion piece to hang with it. This isn’t really a Plein air technically since I did it from a photo but I did paint it outside. It’s also a pre-painting study for a final in oils! Prettyyyy pretty happy with this one tbh. Some stuff to fix in the final but yeah love this one.
- 3. YMCA Rear and Magnolia, gouache in toned sketchbook. I took all my painting stuff with me to the gym just to try out car painting from the cab instead of the rear. Really tight but it worked! The magnolia is also next door and I just love how it looks.
-4. View from the Portable 1 & 2. I subbed for the music teacher at Mary Ingles and all the music classes are in the portable. I happened to have a couple hour long breaks and I snuck in a couple of studies. Tried to capture the chilly Spring morning feeling.
-5. Sage in Spring and Portable Chairs. Had another long break the next day and snuck in another study, plus our sage is coming in again and it was looking nice that evening.
-6. Working on the Ginkgo- tried to capture clearing debris from around our little Ginkgo sapling
-7 & 8. Our maple tree is so beautiful and I also wanted to try out cold press paper. The last one was just noodlin around and I wanted to include them!

Another set of paintings for ya! I finished all the paintings for the month but got busy and forgot to post them. Anyhow here’s another 7 little paintings, some in my sketchbook and one on illustration board.
1. Entrance and Under Magnolia. Acrylic gouache with limited triad. I wanted to paint outside with acrylic gouache just to see how it went and went with a very warm and chromatic triad of Ultramarine Deep, Vermillion, and Med. Yellow Deep. Really challenging but fun.
2. Shadow Shape 1 & 2. Designer/Artist Gouache. These were really fun and were both focused the shape of the values and color temperature. Still just around the house.
3. Holly Trunk and Across the Way. I feel pretty good about how the Holly Trunk came out. I wanted to do a low key painting almost entirely in shadow, which I think mostly worked. The other one was a real slog and I don’t like it at all haha That tree was so bright green/yellow in real life but I struggled with its color and shape a lot. That’s why I do these though! A good vector to practice on. Would leave the tree out completely if I did it again.
4. Can left behind. Some guys were mowing our neighbors yard and left their gas behind. I thought it looked nice against the fresh cut grass and tried to block it all in quickly before they inevitably came back. Would compose it differently next time, but I think it mostly works.
Do you have a favorite from this set? I have the rest of them coming soon. I’m gonna get a good scan of all of them and put them on my website very soon. I’m also working on a more detailed write up I can send out in my newsletter which I’m very sorely behind on. Be on the lookout!

Hey happy Friday! Here’s 10 more paintings for
-three of these are oil…learning a lot from trying out Plein air in oil. It’s so hard 🫠 but fun. Forcing myself to post the first one…man that one is rough.
-Trying to be expressive with all of them but also capture the mood and everything.
-Trying to be more economical with brushstrokes. I dunno man I have just really fallen in love with Plein air painting again now that I have a nice kit. I’ll try to do a tour of that soon! Actually I have 3 set ups- oil, gouache and acrylic gouache!

My first few paintings for !! The more I paint outside and from life the more I fall in love with it. I don’t have my setup completely done yet but I’ve been practicing outside around the house to see how things fit together.

I got the opportunity last year to paint these two cats cuddling on the forest floor for a wonderful client named Layla. She very bravely trusted me with almost no direction and I’m as surprised as anybody that it came out looking pretty alright! This style of working might not look that different from the outside, but I really approached it with a real Trust of Process type attitude. Towards the end the finer details came in, but for most of the piece I was using a fairly large brush. One of the details she asked me to include was a Lilly of the Valley, which is such a beautiful flower I enjoyed painting very much. Layla and her fiancé are heading to England soon, so you could basically say I’m an international artist now! I hope you like it! I’ll be opening up my books for a limited amount of commission slots later this year, so be on the lookout for that.

Trees in my sketch book today. Acrylic gouache on paper. Made with meat based hands, heart, brain, etc. Soul prompt: individual power, enduring through storms, communal usefulness, future utility

I’ve got a bunch of new stuff up in my little shop. Stickers! Prints! Originals! I’ll be shipping stuff out until the 15th- and you can use the code TUESDAY20 on my site for 20% off! If you don’t get anything from me this holiday- please shop small and support artists and artisans working the old fashioned way. We need your support now more than ever!

“Monongahela Ridgetop” 8x10”, Acrylic gouache on Canson illustration board. Just a quick study I knocked out in a couple of hours trying to work on painting clouds. I think it was relatively successful, but I don’t know if I really captured the feeling I felt when I was there. I don’t really consider it a ‘completed’ painting, but it might be one I revisit later! My palette for this one was Ultramarine Deep, Yellow Deep, and Scarlet, all by

A little better view of this little painting for the people asking for a closer look! I’m happy with how it came out, and want to keep painting this house in plein air through the year, so in a bunch of years I’ll have all kinds of views and moods of this place that is so important to me. And in case you missed it this is on a Canson art board of the “Canva” variety with a limited palette of Holbein Acryla Gouache using Scarlet, Yellow Deep and Ash Blue, with my dark as Sepia along with titanium white. I snuck a little luminous red in there but it didn’t fit and got covered up. You really don’t get many greens with this palette so I had to really lean into the warmth of the piece, which I don’t mind at all. I mostly used a stiff fan brush a small round and a small angled brush for this one. I tried to make the Halloween decorations hanging on the tree the focal point and saved the most pure and saturated oranges for that. I hope you like it! 🍁

Some small stuff I’ve been working on over the past few weeks! There are some little series, a plein air painting, a couple chromatic horrors from Beyond i keep dreaming about. Normal stuff!!! Painting these little blocks are fun but also help supplement the business when times are a little slow! Ye olde iPhone 12 took quite a tumble and is needing upgraded lol totally unrelated. Anyhow they’re not really on my site but if you message me we can work something out. Business! 🧑‍💼 📈📎🗂️💼✂️📥