Last One of This Series

Well, at long last I have come to the end of painting old rusty trucks.  I'll do some more of them at some point in time, but right now, it's time to move on.  I've really enjoyed painting them, and have learned a ton.  Also, I've learned there is a ton more to learn.  Oy Vey!  Well, it's a good thing I'm still having fun with it and want to keep going.  I really do think this is the best one I have done.  I'm posting several pictures again this time too.  I got some good feedback about it last time and am going to try to incorporate pictures of the steps more often.

 Here is the start.  A simple drawing.  Only the truck and a little bit of the fence.  I've moved the center of interest off the center of the paper.  Hopefully, it make the painting just a bit more interesting.

The underpinning of the truck body.  You can see the green and red as well as the rust color.  More layers to come.

I'm not sure this is the perfect place to start, but I get so hyped to see the truck come to life that I start with it.  I may have made a small mistake by painting the bumper at this point, but I can fix it later if I need to.

Background, and foreground go in.  Nothing with any detail, just some basic colors.  Note there is just a hint of blue for a sky.   Trees will cover the rest.  I'm not sure why I did the inside of the cab and the grill.  Mostly I think it was because I was being interrupted while I was painting and that is just how it turned out.  Also, you can tell I added another layer to the truck body.

A few trees and some shadows.  I am thinking of leaving the trees like this, but they look a little to airy.  I think I will eventually have to paint a layer over them.  Some shadowing under the front clip of the truck and it really comes to life.  It's amazing what a little color can do some times.

Well, I painted over the leaves of the trees in the background.  I've got to do all my detail work on the truck now before I put the foreground on.  I have to do this so that if I paint over the truck with the foreground, it will really push it back into the painting.    At this point, I'm worried about the grill.  The picture I'm painting from shows the grill as black, or at least really dark.  I don't want it to be a big black hole in the center of the painting.

This painting for sale.  9x12  $30

Here it is, the finished painting.  The wheel is done, the grill is done, and the weeds help to push the truck back into the painting.  I think it turned out great. I couldn't be happier with it.  I hope you all like it too.

Another Old Truck

So I thought I would let you all see the steps I take to create a painting.  We'll start with a drawing and go through the final product.  I've kind of wanted to do this for a while now.  I think it is much more interesting than just seeing the final painting.  I apologize for the quality, or lack there of, some of the pictures.  instead of scanning all the picture, i just snapped a photo with my phone (wow, doesn't that sound funny?).  While I did use the flash on it, and the picture is under a light, I somehow still get grey spots on the photos.  So, without further adieu, here we go.

Here we are with the drawing.  Not too  much detail.  The truck has a lot of detail, but the foreground and background not too much.  I go back and forth between wanting more, and wanting less.

This is the first layer of paint.  It is this layer that will add the color that you will see on the truck.  You can see the reds, yellows, blues and greens.  Even though more coats of paint will go over the top, this layer will always be able to be seen.

Here is the second layer of paint on the truck body.  At this point I need to decide if I like the color or not.  If not, I'll add another layer to change the color.  What do you think from the final painting, did I add a third layer?

Here I've added a blue sky and some trees in the background.  Notice that the truck still isn't done.  What I have left is mostly detail work.  I like to leave that till the end.  Since a lot of the detailing is at or around the edges of the truck, I want to get the mid-ground and the foreground in place so that I can paint over it if I need to.

Nearly done now.  You can see I've go the grill done, and the shadowing in the cab, wheel wells and around the grill.  I've put some shadowing on the truck itself.  The last detail is to put in some weeds in the foreground.  Adding the weeds will help to push the truck back in the picture a bit.  This is also a good time to mention the red in the foreground.  I think I've mentioned it before, but red tints make things look closer, blue tints make things look further away.  Just look at the mass of trees int he middle of the picture.  They are clearly bluer than the trees around them and look much further away.

This painting for sale.  9x12  $30

And here is the finished product.  The truck sitting in a field rusting away with some weeds growing around it.  Hope  you all enjoy it.

Old Blue Truck

SOLD!

Ok, so I tried to do something that may not have worked out quite the way I wanted it to.  Then again, some parts of this painting are brilliant 

So, I started with a picture of this truck.  Someone had photoshpped it so that the only thing in color was the truck.  It absolutely burst off the page because it was a beautiful blue color.  (Well, actually it was blue, yellow, red and rust, but for the ease of this commentary, I'll just call it blue.)  The truck was sitting in the wood with tree trunks and branches all around.  I didn't think the background was all that exiting, but it made the truck jump out so much that I had to try it.  Well, as you may have guessed, I didn't use their background, I used my own.  Yes, thats right, just made it up on the fly.  I wanted to make my background a little darker around the truck and a little lighter everywhere else, but it didn't quite work out that way.  Oh, well, there is always next time.  One think I did  do, and you will have to look closely to see it is make the grey in the background more blue-grey, and make the foreground more red-grey.  If you look closely you can see it.  I did it because the blue makes things look more distant, and the red, more close.

As for the truck itself, I think its pretty good.  I did a lot of layers to give the truck the kind of mottled look.  The first was just water to get everything wet.  Then came yellows and reds.  Finally, blues on top. I tried to allow for highlights along where there were bends in the metal, but I didn't work out well this time and I quickly abandoned that plan.  As you look at the truck, take not of the lining.  Instead of making lines at the end with a pen, i actually used paint and brush and painted it.  Some of them look a little better than others, but in general, I think all the lined came out pretty good.   I like this painting and already have it hanging in my office.  Next week, I start a new painting.  Enjoy

Here is what I am working on

Just  little preview.  I've begun working on my next painting.  No, I don't really want to be known as the painter of trucks, but I don really like old trucks.  I apologize for the greying of this picture.  My scanner bed is just a bit too small for the size of paper that I paint on.  Where it comes off the glass, a little greying appears.  The further away fromt he glass, the more grey.  I might blue this up a bit more, though I really like the way it looks right now.  I'm also considering doing the background in sepia tone.  My hope would be that it would really make the truck stand out.  I've still got all the shadowing to do on the truck too.  Hopefully next time you see this truck you will see the WOW Factor.  Enjoy

Camping, VW Style

SOLD!

Yes, Yes, Yes, I know I have painted this picture before.  I originally saw the photo that this was taken from and thought of my neighbors Jim and Karen.  They have a VW very similar to this, and go camping once a month or so.  The first rendition of this was OK, but that was the problem with it.  It was just OK.  There was nothing special about it at all.  This one is far and away better. Im working hard to allow the paint to mix on the paper instead of in the palette and I think I accomplished that.

I started this painting by putting down a light wash of yellow and green.  It covered everything except the person sitting at the picnic table and the posts.  After looking at it I panicked.  I needed to have the roof of the camper white.  I put a second layer on everything except the van and the person and the posts.  Still the roofline looked yellow.  I painted the van.  Still the roof looked yellow.  Everything looked yellow.  I painted the trees. Suddenly, not everything looked yellow.  The van actually stood out away from the background.  and there was a clear break between the hills in the distance and the camping space.  The trees worked great to break up the picture and give it the depth it needed.

After painting the posts, the picnic table and the person, I looked again.  Not too bad.  I might actually be getting the hang of this.  I put the shadows on, and the grass around the posts and that's a wrap.  I like the way it look.  The mostly brownish grass is exactly what we have out here.  It really looks like this could be a campsite on the central coast.

I'm hoping to see Jim and Karen this weekend so I can give this to them.  Hope they like it.  Hope you all enjoy it.  I had fun painting it.

A Barn in the 'Hood

Ok, so on this painting i was working on letting color mix on the paper.  You can see on the barn roof and siding, that the colors are not uniform.  We all want to think that colors are mostly solid, but if you look closely, most colors are a mishmash of many many different colors.  I think I am getting a handle on form and shape, I might even be getting a handle on depth in my paintings.   Painting while allowing multiple colors to make up the body of each object may well make my paintings look more alive and vibrant.

Hope you enjoy.

Some More Sketching

Today's paintings are the rest of the the random sketching I was able to do over the past several weeks.

Starting at the top:  The play structure at Monty Young Park in Morro Bay.  To its right is a plant that sits on the credenza next to my television.

Starting the second row is a car that my son got for Christmas, and then a small Christmas tree in a planter.

The picture to the left of this writing is another plant in the house and the last painting is the clock we have in our living room.

Of all these, my favorite is the living room clock.  It is chrome, and the wall color behind it yellow (of course).  I think it turned out great and just the right amount of shadow on the wall.

Other than that i really like the little christmas tree for some reason.

Well, just wanted to let you all in on some of the other small things I had been working on

Quick Sketches of Statues

Here are two statues from my house.  The first is a painting of a copy of The Thinker by Rodin.  You will recognize the classic form of the man hunched over with his chin on his hand.  I tried to paint it quickly and loosely using only a couple of colors, but varying them enough so that you might distinguish the depth of the statue.  I hope I did it justice















This second painting is one of a woman wearing a necklace and headdress.  Again I tried to keep to a couple of colors only, but while still allowing you to see the shadows and depth of the painting.  At this point I will admit to not being the best at seeing shadows in what I paint.  I try, but sometimes seem to only paint where I think the shadows are.  This is somewhat a mix of seeing and feeling where the shadows are.  Looking back i should have added a little more shadow around the jewelry, and filled in her hollow eyes.

This painting was done on drawing paper instead of watercolor paper.  Thus the warping of the paper that you can see in the scan.

How you enjoy.

   

How Now Brown....Door?

Ive painted other doors before, and will paint plenty in the future, I am sure,  but this may be the one where I look back and say that I have kind of changed techniques.  I started by drawing a very (well, at least fairly) good representation of a wooden door in a stone wall.  I didn't draw any of the stones in the wall, but drew everything else.  I had plans to do what I always do, which is to paint this little bit, then move the paper, paint another little bit, then repeat, repeat, repeat until I have what I think is a finished painting.  Well, after I started the door that way, I took a little different turn.  Everything after the wood was done free form and in rapid succession.  While the coloring is a little less than imaginative, I think it made for some really nice bits to the painting.

Painting with the strict way I would have painted in the past, this painting would have taken me an hour or more,  but since I painted the brown of the door, this took me no more than 10 minutes.

For me, the stone really stands out,   I could have used a bit more color, but they really seem to stand out, and the door does look like it is set back just a bit in the jam.

Hope you like it.