Catching Up

I haven't forgotten about all you avid Dabfly Arts readers.  I have been busy.  In the past week, I've worked overtime, held a garage sale, been across town about 14, flown to the moon and visited the rings of Saturn.  Let's just say I've been a bit busy.  Well, no matter, I'm back and putting up the pictures I should have been putting up all along.

The first painting is of course some apples still on a tree.  They must be getting ready to pick they are slowly turning red.  The second a Scrub Jay which we have in the western states.    They are actually really nice birds, not like those nasty Blue Jays.  Finally a simple painting of a Kingfisher.  Each of these now comes with a video showing how I made it. (Picture on left, video on right)  Take a look to see how I do it.  Thanks for the view.

Green Apples and a Clean Palette

 Mmmmmm, who doesn'l love tasty delicious apples.  They are nutritious, delicious, and I'm told that if you eat one a day no doctors can be around you.  It must be kinka like that garlic/vampire thing.  I don't really know why apples and doctors can't get along, but so be it, more apples for me.

For about the past month, I've been trying to use the last of all the paint I had on my palette without introducing any new paint.  In this painting I have exhausted all of my yellow, nearly all the red, and all the green.  What's left you ask,  a little vandyke brown, some purple and both light and dark cerulean blue.

These paintings were actually done with almost no paint of any kind that has green in the title.  I had just a dab of viridian, and you can see it just slightly in the top painting.  the bottom one has none.

In looking at the bottom apple, I should have put a different stem on it and called it a green tomato.  I think it turned out more like a tomato.  LOL.    Well, anyway, tomorrow I start with a totally clean palette.


Its been a long time coming that I clean and reorganize my palette.  When I first set it up I had only about 6 colors, then slowly added more, and kinda just lumped the colors together.  Now that I have read up on color theory a little bit, I really want to group things a bit differently.  I'm gonna go with some sort of warm, cool, and earthy groupings.  Wish me luck.  And while I get them all worked out, enjoy some apples.

Buckets of Apples

Since I'm in the "Heavy Metal" challenge this month, I decided to paint a few more metal pictures.  I think that I get carried away trying to make my painting look "right."  Whatever that means.  In so doing, I end up putting a lot more paint on paper than I want to, and my paintings lose some of the transparency, or lightness that I want to keep.  I want to get to a place where very few washes will satisfy what I want the painting to look like, and then to stop fiddling.  I'm not there, but I'm still working to get there.

Hope you enjoy these fun little paintings.