Daughter, Again

Ok, so, after I painted my daughter last week, I thought I would take another shot at it this week.

The good:  I don't have, or she doesn't have, hay stack hair.  last weeks hair, I thought, was completely ghastly.

I used my newly reclaimed paints.  As it turns out, it has several disks which are pretty good flesh tones.

The bad:  I don' think my daughters nose and mouth completely line up.  and one of her nostrils seems a bit wide.  Oh well.  If I was a pro, I'd worry about it.  But since I'm not, I think it looks pretty good.

Hope you like it.

King Me

Last week I was a little frustrated with my painting and a friend of mine suggested I look at things a bit differently and use different colors or different paints to paint my pictures.  Well, I've got some old paints that were made in West Germany.  I don't know what West Germans knew about paint or anything.  I do know that the colors in this set are kind of different and mostly opaque.  When I say they are kind of different, what I mean is that 7 different blues, none of which match with my existing french ultramarine, pthalo blue, cerulean blue deep or cerulean blue.  It's the same thing with the 6 greens, 7 reds and 5 yellows.  

I had used this set for about a week when I first started painting  but couldn't get used to the colors.  They are just weird.  But for this painting I mixed and mixed and came out with colors that I think are pretty good.  In fact, I made a deal with myself.  If Im gonna paint with a wide swath of colors, I can't mix a big pool of one color and keep dipping it in.  I have to make a small pool of it, and add too it or change it each time I dip into it.  You can see in the body of the bird there are reds oranges and yellows all throughout.  And the blue of the bird is at least 4 different shades throughout.  

The log the bird is sitting on started as a really pale grey, like it was really bleached out.  then it got a bit darker grey, blue, yellow, green and finally it is what it is.  I don't think I'm done with this one, you might see hime make a return on this sit in a finalized form, but for now, I'm back and having fun with some new paints.  Trying to mix any kind of a normal color with these crazy paints is fun in itself.  Thanks for the nudge Kelly Murphy.

Junipero Serra

If you have ever been to my state of California, and been lucky enough to travel to Santa Barbara, and have taken a trip to the Santa Barbara Mission, then you have probably seen Junipero Serra.   For the rest of you, just look to the left.  Junipero was instrumental in founding the Mission and also in creating the El Camino Real, the road up and down California that connected all the missions.

So, I'm trying very hard to paint with larger strokes, at least in the initial stages of the painting, and keeping thing much wetter when I paint.  I've also been keeping my paper up on my easel, instead of nearly level, which is how I normally paint.

Beginning with basic colors and washes and working my way to progressively smaller brushes and finer strokes, I'm hoping to create an image o f the picture I'm painting, not necessarily a reproduction of it.  I try to think of it as if I am looking through a filter with many layers of gauze or hose on it.  Each time I paint a layer on my painting I can take a layer off the filter.  Therefore when I start things are quite fuzzy and I can't make out any detail.  After several layers, the details come more into focus.  As long as I stop painting before all the layer have been taken off the filter, I can't paint the fine details.  Thats what I tried to do with this.

You can easily see the outline and if you allow your mind, you can see details like his fingers and his nose, but if you look closely, you'll see that I didn't actually paint any of those.

Well, I had fun with this, but think I got a little carried away with it.  Enjoy.

Daughter

Ok, well, I had good intentions with this.  Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite like I had hoped.  He has a kind od smashed in head, and a squatty face.  Hmmmm.  Where did It all go wrong.

I thought that a lot of this painting actually went right.  It's unfortunate that her hair really spoiled a lot of the painting.  I threw a blue background on, with a little salt, just to try it out.  Hmm, I might have to try another portrait.  Hopefully, whomever I paint will look better than this.

McWay Falls

Ok, this is a quick sketch, a trial of sorts, for a picture to be painted later.  I did it on cheap paper, but there are some things I really like about this.  For those of you who have followed my paintings, you know that my paintings have been very tight in the past and have been getting looser and looser recently.  This painting displays some of my best wet in wet to date.  

The parts I really like:  the beach and the trees on the left hand side.  I've been trying to get the whole paper wet with paint at the beginning of the painting, letting all  the colors mix and trying hard not to force the paint to do what I want it to do.  In this painting I let the paint do what it wants to do, and tried to stay hands off.  The way the water dissolves into the sand of the beach, or the beach into the water, whichever way you want to look at it, makes me happy to see.  The layering of the trees also makes me happy.  Ok, I got a little too much saturation of color in the distant trees, but the technique and thinking was right.  I can fix the saturation in the next one.  and in the foreground, it looks as though there are 3 or 4 layers of pine trees.  I tried mixing a few different colors of green so that it didn't look like one giant green blob.  I got at least a few different colors.   and the closest ones, while they were wet, I just threw in a little purple for no particular reason.

I should say at this point that painting on a larger scale seems to be easier. It was fun to just scribble in some lines and see it come out close to what I wanted to see.  And for some reason with a bigger brush, this was easier.

I had to put in some leaves from the gum tree in the foreground.  I think in the finished piece, I'll put in even more leaves.  It really did help to push the rest of the painting back.

I'm not a big fan of how the rocks turned out.  I'll have to work on those.  My intent was just to show some texture, but I think I over did it.

Overall, I'm happy with this and if I get a few things worked out with it, I know that its intended recipient will be ecstatic about it.

Thanks for viewing.

Lone Tree in the Snow

Ok, so today I have a series of pictures for you.  Trying to work wet in wet in the background, and dry brush in the foreground.

You can see in the first photo, I've got the tree sketched out, and have blocked in some colors.  I put just a little color in the sky.  Maybe the color from the distant hills is reflected in the sky just a bit.





This second one, I've got the tree in and some rocks and grass.  I tried leaving a little white here and there, especially on the ground where I think the light might be reflecting off the snow.

Adding details to the tree and to the grass.  The tree in the photo has some really deep grooves in it.  It's pretty wind warn and has a real ancient feel to it.  

 A few more details on the tree and a few more sprigs of winter grass and I'm just about done.  Not only did I use many shades of brown and red in the base color of the tree, but I'm not using a single color in all the shadows.  I think I've got 5 or six different colors.

Here it is framed and hanging on the wall.  I noticed after looking at it that there really wasn't enough differentiation between the near and far hills,  I went back and put just a touch of blue to create a hill.

I really like this painting, and the woman I painted it for really likes it.  It is currently hanging in her office.  It really makes me feel good to hand off a painting like this that someone really likes.  Hope you all like it as much as I do.  Thanks so much.

Weekend Sketching

I love reading books.  I've probably read 30 or so already this year, and the latest was a watercolor book.  In it, like in all books of this sort, the artist tells you how to paint a myriad of different things and different techniques in which to accomplish this.

So, I decided to take this particular artist and author up on his challenge and started painting a few of the paintings from the book.  To the left is the second version of this painting.  It's not quite like his, but its not bad for a quick weekend sketch.

The second painting is my first attempt at the same scene.  Not bad, but not nearly in the league as the top one.

This last one is just one more that I took from him.  Again, not bad for a quick sketch.

I should say that these are all on my sketch paper, which is very similar to mixed media paper in texture.  That is, its smooth and almost a little waxy.  I got it so that I could easily take it with me and paint on location.  The air here is super dry and when I venture outside to paint, I find that I often have trouble keeping moisture on the paper.  Thus this paper.

Anyway, enjoy.

A Few More Sketches

 This post is all about quick sketching.  I'm trying to learn to draw things better, and hopefully, that will help me paint things better.

Here are just a few of the things I've been able to sketch and paint quickly.  None of it is great art, but what it is is great fun.

Portrait of a Friend of Mine

I've been trying to work back slowly into this watercolor thing, and I like painting birds but.....I guess I just needed to do something a bit more.  

In addition to posting my artwork here, on my art blog site, I post to G+.  Somewhere on G+ I ran into a fellow artist and contributor named Kelly.  I didn't really wanna paint a picture of myself (tried it, bad subject matter that turned into a bad portrait), but I wanted to paint a portrait.  Kelly was gracious enough to allow me to paint a picture of her.  Two days later and this is what I came up with.

BTW, if you are interested in some good artwork and an uplifting look at life, check out her blog site.

So, I think I'm getting a little better with hair, though its a long slow process.  And I guess I can say the same about portraits in general.  Looking back at the first portraits I've done, I see some really rudimentary work.  This one, while not a Rembrandt by any stretch is miles ahead of what that one was.

I feel like I am not nearly as afraid to leave a hard edge on the paper.  I used to be afraid to do that and had to smooth all the edges before I could move on.  It made it an extremely long process to do anything.  Like probably 2 or 3 times as along to paint any given picture.  Yes, on this I did smooth a few edges out.  I didn't feel as though I should leave all hard edges, but a few weren't too bad.  It's a little unfortunate that I used the mixed media paper instead of watercolor paper because the water kept pooling and made it harder than I think it had to be.  But I just thought that with as hot as its been here, the watercolor paper would dry too fast.

Here is the picture I used as a reference.  I had a little trouble with the shadows in her hair on the right hand side of her head.  If I were to do this one agian, I would try to get that a bit better, but I'm happy with it.  I think the representation of Kelly is pretty good.  And what is more important is that when I sent this picture to her, she liked it.  In the end, I think that is more important than producing a great work of art.  I got the enjoyment of painting it, and she got the enjoyment of seeing it.  For me that's enough.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did.  Enjoy.

I must really like red heads

This is obviously a very proud bird.  He's sitting on a branch with his chest puffed out.  There must be a female on a brach close by.  He seems to be looking off to the side, so perhaps she'e just off the page to the left.

For those that have followed my paintings for a while now, you can see that I am a lot less "tight" with my paint.  I'm trying hard to let things be, and just allow the paint to fill in the spaces it needs to fill.  I've seen that if I fidget with things and try to get them "right" the only thing I can be certain of is that things won't look "right".  If I let the paint do it paint thing, things look a bit better and less fiddled with.

Well, its a quick painting that I had fun with, hope you all like it.

Some Red Head

Ok, here is a quick sketch of a little red bird.  Not exactly what kind of bird it is.

Working on painting loose, but may have gotten a little too loose around his head and on the branch in the foreground.

All in all it's not a bad little painting.

I've looked at this painting several times over the past day or so, and I keep trying to figure out what this guys story it.  I haven't quite gotten it, but whatever he is doing, it looks like he needs to wear gloves for it.  Maybe they are driving gloves?   Not really sure.  Well, anyway, enjoy.