Be careful the sorts of things you post on the net, and specifically, on this site. You never know when some crazed artist type may take liberties with it.
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2108975634
There’s something familiar about that piper.
Are those Kintail pipes?
Particularly nice work on the hands.
I must say I am both impressed and flattered. Wow.
A striking verisimilitude!
I think the fact that the artist got all of the bagpipe anatomy correct is impressive. It wouldn’t have surprised me had the artist painted the piper’s head between the bass and tenor drone and the hands fingering the blowstick.
What I didn’t notice on previous viewing of the photo was the embroidery on the bag cover. What’s it say, Piper Smith?
You should definitely try and get a print from the artist.
The artist is our own Glands (aka Lewis Blevins). He is a marvelous painter (not to mention a fine piper indeed!), and has generously shared email photos of his work with me… stunning work!!
The writing on the bag says “Laurelie”… it is my wife’s name, romanticised. 
CLICK
OK, now the light’s come on.
That is a nice painting… what’s the media? My artistic skills have been eaten up by piping.
I remember drawing a pair of piper’s hands. It’s a good lesson in anatomy and perspective. Foreshortening was always tricky for me.
And having your wife’s epithet on your bag cover is very romantic. I think piping is really a reaction formation to romanticism… (Freud, eat your heart out).
She has been a great supporter of my piping over the years.
I think my wife would think I was implying that she is a bag, if I did that.
Good job Lewis, and he looks better in your painting.
You know what would make a good business card?
Joseph E. Smith
Piper, reedmeister, muse
As you can see, I took artistic liberties with the painting.
I enhanced the sky and made a “wet environment” more believable yet pushed all the background of the field and sky to the back so it did not compete with the subject.
I changed the angle of the second pipe as I could not get the recession of it properly on my first atempt at it and it seemed to want to be parallel to the first to get the first one to recess over the shoulder better…oh well…need more experience.
I left off the yellow thingy on the beret. too much competition with the rest of the image.
I felt the name on the bag cover would make it too busy and compete with the tartan so I left that out too.
The camera lens shows all edges as hard. I softened most of them to give the painting a “real” visual effect…sort of what the eye would see when watching the piper march. The blurring of the tartan details that one does not see but the camera captured vividly…yet my tartan still looks like the original…deemphasizing some of the sleeve buttons so they do not distract from the focal point of the piper in the act of playing…adding color to some areas devoid of such and harmonizing all the colors throughout…
The hands…the hands…the hands…trickiest part of the anatomy to paint and make them look real…these are close but still not what I hope for…gotta get better.
FYI…no black paint was used on the painting. The lovely tones in the wood of the pipes…not seen well in the photo…were achieved by mixes of various amounts of indigo, transparent oxide red, alizarin crimson, viridan, and cerulean blue that was killed a little with white. They look like black ebony becasue of the way the eye sees the resultant mix relative to other colors in the painting.
My daughter, one of my best critics, also says that this painting looks better than the photograph. When she and others proclaim that then I know I “beat the camera”…and that is something I strive to do when painting from photos. I prefer painting from real life on site…but I don’t think a GHB piper would ever be able to stand still…and I would not be able to hear much after a couple of hours of painting one playing while posing. 
The painting is oil on linen stretched over canvas stretcher bars. It is 11 inches by 14 inches.
The painting will be entered into an art contest or two on the advice of local mentors. I will have it professionally photographed in the near future for entry of the image into those contests.
If any of you are interested in a print of this scene I can get them done on canvas so that they will look “real” for a cost to you of about $40-$50. That’s cheap. Let me know soon as the same folks who do the photos can create the giclee prints. My paintings of this size usually go for about $500 these days. I do commissions if anyone is interested…that aspect of my “Irish Cultural Arts” business will crank up this summer.
One of these days, not exactly sure when, the painting will be Joe’s as a gift from me. 
I’d be a better piper if it weren’t for the need to be painting…and I’d be a better painter if it weren’t for the piping…so, I’ll just wallow in mediocrity with regards to both for the rest of my life.
Yeah right Lewis.
Just as long as I can hear and see you wallow occasionally.
(That sounds a bit odd, doesn’t it).