McWay, slightly differently

I've painted McWay falls before.  This time from a slightly different angle.  And this time I set out to have different values in the paintings. Definitely trying to get the closest stuff to have the highest values and the darkest hues.  The water I think is ok, and the isthmus I think is fairly good, but I think I got the tree on the left a little too dark.  It doesn't look like it sits back quite far enough for me.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn't get the tree in the foreground quite dark enough.  hmmm.

For anyone that doesn't know, this is a little cove that sits on the California coast near Big Sur.  Only about a billion pictures have been taken of the place.  I've not actually been there.  Ok, if you followed the above link you will see that my painting doesn't have quite the color the real place has, but that's kind of California today.  We haven't had a good rain all summer and everything, I mean everything is brown.

Well, anyway, there is my little picture.  Hope you all  like it.

New Palette: Follow up

Re-organizing my palette and charting my colors may have been the best move I have ever made.  I started a new painting yesterday and everything went smashingly.  Ok, ok, let me pump the brakes for a second.  It's still me painting, so the ceiling on the painting isn't all that high.  But having the colors correlate to the color wheel made mixing things soooooooo easy.  I used to have everything compartmentalized.  Blues all the way over here, reds all the way over there, yellows are in their own corner too, and green has blue and yellow, hmm ... where to put them.

Well, now I can easily see how my colors relate to each other, and can mix any secondary or tertiary colors with ease.  And since I don't really like using grey from a tube because it never seems to really be the shade of grey that I want, I can quickly make it up.

I don't expect any John Singer Sargent's or Winslow Homer's to come off my easel any time soon, but I'm totally excited to be able to see the colors and how they work together much better than I ever had been able to before.

New Palette

Ok, here it is, my new palette.  I've got my colors arranged loosely according to the color wheel.  Yes, I can see that there is no bottom on this wheel.  The best part is knowing that there are 12 colors that they are basically in the right order, I can quickly and easily make my own grey.

I took it upon myself to make a little cheat sheet for myself too.  If I actually use it, I'll always know what colors I'll be using.  I'll also know what colors to refill each others with, and which ones could or should be replaced with different colors.  Of course that last one will require a new card to be made up.

I've not put down any of my earth tones  I'll put them directly on the palette when I need them for the time being.  Then I'll see how much I end up using them maybe even give them their own area.

Anyway, it's not rocket science, but there it is.

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.

Melons and Carrots

I've got a watercolor painting book I've kind of bene working through.  I thought it would be kinda fun to try to duplicate many of the paintings in the book.  This is one of them.  Carrots and Melons on a table.  I'm trying to work quickly, both drawing and painting.  I did this wet in wet, and up on my easel, instead of laying on my desktop.  I still need to let the colors come together more on the paper instead of mixing on the palette, but i'll get there.

Enjoy.

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.