Coca-Cola Bottle with Bottle Cap by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
Here is another painting that was interesting to work on. Capturing the green color in the glass along with the different contours on the bottle was a challenge. My favorite area is where the bottle cap goes behind the bottle and is refracted by the glass. The other cool thing is getting to open an ice cold bottle of Coke with a bottle opener and drinking it out of a glass bottle. It just seems better than plastic for some reason. This is painting 125 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold.

Cherry Pie by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
This is a cherry pie that my youngest daughter helped to prepare for our Thanksgiving dinner. I loved the woven pieces of crust on top of the pie with the pie filling showing through in little squares. She did make it clear to everyone not involved in the pie making that weaving the crust was not easy. This is painting 124 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold

Gumball Machine by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
When I was growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska we had a grocery store about four blocks from our house. By today's standards this grocery store was on the extreme small side of things. My mother would do most of our grocery shopping at that store and my younger sister and I would usually be with her. There were two things at the grocery store that I looked forward to more than anything else there. One of the things was a mechanical horse that you could ride for a penny, the other was the two or three different gumball machines that also cost one penny. We would ask for a couple of pennies each to ride the horse and buy a gumball while the clerk manually hit the keys on a cash register the total the groceries. (No scanners back then!) I'm not sure why I always think of that little grocery store when I see one of these old gumball machines but I always do. The little grocery store is long gone and so is the mechanical horse ride for a penny. I found out that most of these old gumball machines are also almost long gone. I have wanted to paint one of them for my Painting A Day Series for a long time now and it took several days of looking before I ran across one of them. This is painting 123 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold

Glass Holiday Ornament by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
I have been thinking about painting one these glass Christmas tree decorations for a couple of months. I decided to at least wait until it was closer to the holiday before I tried it. I love the burgundy color of these particular decorations. It is amazing how the color of the reflective surface affects all the things reflected in it. The glass ball was sitting on a white tiled table and I had to keep making the reflection more and more the color of the glass before it looked correct. This is painting 122 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold

Remarqued Prints - Iowa Ducks Unlimited Print of the Year by Darren Maurer

Hey! I'm still here and still working. I've been finishing some commission work and signing and numbering lots of prints. This is a photo of ten of the Iowa Ducks Unlimited Prints of the Year for 2007. I painted an acrylic color remarque on 15 of the prints. I am currently working on signing and numbering a total of 2,400 of this particular print. I will have an artist edition of 100 of these prints available very soon. If anyone is interested in purchasing a print, they will be selling for $225. Color remarques will be an additional $100. In addition, my 2007 Iowa Duck Stamp design will be available and sell for $110. The price includes a mint 2007 Iowa Duck stamp. I am offering my winning 2000 and 2001 Iowa Duck Stamp prints along with the 2007 Duck Stamp print and 2007 Print of the Year at a packaged price. Email for details.

Raw Egg and Shell by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
I wanted to try painting a raw egg. We found these clear glass bowls over the weekend and they were perfect for this painting. Leaving the broken shell beside the bowl adds some interest to the painting. Once again the fun part of the painting ended up not being my subject but one of the supporting pieces in the composition. Painting the bowl was the fun part of this piece. Painting glass is always fun though. This is painting 121 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold

Hooded Merganser Commission by Darren Maurer

8" x 10"
I have been busy finishing up some commission work and haven't been keeping up as well on my daily paintings. I finished the large commission landscape painting and delivered it tonight and my client loved it. Whewwwww!!!! Always a relief. After producing hundreds of paintings for people over the years, I'm still always afraid they might not like it. I was also commissioned to produce a painting of a duck. Here it is. My client is going to give it as a gift to a good friend for Christmas this year. My client wasn't concerned about species type or composition on the painting. As an artist, I like the freedom and I appreciate the trust they give me to produce a painting that they will be happy with. I decided to paint a sort of companion piece to my painting, "Reflection", that was chosen as Iowa Ducks Unlimited's Print of the Year for 2007. It is one of my very favorite paintings with waterfowl as subject that I have ever done. My client found me due to this wonderful artist's tool we call the internet. They noticed that I was a three time winner of Iowa's Duck Stamp Contest (2001, 2002, and 2007) and also the Iowa Ducks Unlimited Artist of the Year for the upcoming year of 2007 and hired me to produce this painting for a friend. Of course this painting isn't available, but I would welcome discussing other commission projects with anyone interested.

Rubber Ducky #2 by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
I have been wanting to paint another rubber ducky from my wife's collection of them. I was struggling with how to set up the rubber ducky to make an interesting composition. I was thinking of all kinds of related objects that I could include in the painting. Then it hit me today that one good idea would be to just paint the rubber ducky by itself and have some water around it like it just came out of the bathtub. I'm happy with the composition. It is simple and usually simple is better. This is painting 120 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold

Junior Mints by Darren Maurer

5" x 7"
"Who wouldn't want a Junior Mint???? They're delicious!!!!!!!!!" That's from a classic Seinfeld episode and I'm still a big fan. That's not why I painted Junior Mints though. I wanted to do this painting to go along with some of the other classic candy paintings I've finished. Certain candies have the power to take you back to another time and place. I heard a neat story from the person that purchased the my Peppermint Candies painting. The story was about her grandfather. When she was a kid her grandfather would always have some of the peppermint candies with him and give them out to his grandchildren. I always like to hear how or why one of my paintings touched someone enough to purchase it. I hope this painting reminds someone of a person they knew such as a grandparent or a takes them back to a place like maybe out to a movie years ago. This is painting 119 in my Painting A Day Series. Painting Sold