A Bit of a Landscape

I haven't painted much in recent months, or at least posted anything. So here we go...

The beginnings of a sky, using the "Gamblin 1980" line of oil paints and an Artist's Loft (Michael's) 11 by 14 stretched canvas. This first stage used 3 colors (titanium white, cerulean blue, neutral gray).

Beginnings of a Sky

Adding some pinks to the sky, and a horizon fading into the distance. Added colors are cadmium red medium, Payne's gray and Veridian green.

Sky and a Horizon

Lastly we add olive green, ultramarine blue and yellow ochre. Soften the horizon transition. add a foreground.

A Bit of a Landscape

This was fun to knock out in an hour or so, but there is so much left to learn. And it's amazing how much things seem foreign after a hiatus of only a couple of months. It's kinda like starting over again...

Sunrise Over the Hills

Enough is enough. No more tweaking this painting

Sunrise Over the Hills (oils on canvas, 20 by 30)

I'm relatively pleased, but one way or another it is time to move on. 

Sunrise, Part 3

A few more tweaks today. 

Sunrise Over the Hills (oils on canvas, 20 x 30 inches)

Break up the sunrise blob. Fix the foreground a bit.

Not quite there yet but better. I've enjoyed painting with this limited color palette.

Happy Painting part 2

I took about 10 minutes this evening to tweak a few things with this work in progress.

Sunrise Over the Hills, part 2 (20 x 30 oils on canvas)

There is still more to do, but it is getting closer to what I want. Small steps...

The white/yellow/pink glow on the horizon needs to be broken up by light turquoise sky. The foreground needs work. The left side needs more "woodland clutter". And so on.

Onward we go...

[PS - It is interesting to note that the first/prior post on this painting was photographed later at night with the dining room light on, resulting in an artificial "orangish" color shift. This photograph was taken in daylight with no artificial light, and is thus far more reflective of the actual colors...]

Happy Painting

At the end of an often-long day, I paint because it relieves stress and makes me happy.

Sunrise over the Hills (oils on canvas, 20 by 30 inches)

This makes me happy.

Lukas 1862 oils on a fairly large canvas. This is layer 1. Layer 2 to come.

This was painted almost entirely with a limited palette of turquoise greens, dark earth greens and some blues and grays for the sky. Plus the sunrise colors, of course.

Stage 2 will mainly be to refine the sunrise and fill in the trees on the lefthand hillside. We shall see how it goes...

Painting Again

It's been too long since I have painted anything in oils (or any media for that matter). My normal painting space, so as not to be shut away in the basement, is at the end of our dining room table in the dining room (which is very rarely used as a dining room). My makeshift "studio" got put away for the holidays, and one thing led to another and here we are in mid-April and I keep saying "I have to get my painting stuff out again..." So today I did.

Over the course of a couple hours this evening, with short breaks for checking in on how the Phillies were doing, I threw some paint on some canvas. In this case, Lukas 1862 oils on Michaels store brand extra smooth stretched canvases. The goal was just to use some paint after a 3-4 month hiatus. Both were painted from imagination.

The first is a view across a valley to the hills and horizon beyond.

Across the Valley (12 by 16 canvas, oils)

The second was a darker palette-cleansing exercise that turned into a springtime hillside in the moments near dawn. It's dark, but the light is coming...

Springtime Hillside at Dawn (14 by 18 canvas, oils)

Neither is a masterpiece by any means, but it felt very good to pick up a brush for the first time in about 4 months and do something. Anything.

This was intended to "prime the pump" and get me painting again, nothing more. And I think it accomplished that.

Autumn Impression #4

I paint the same sort of thing a lot.

Autumn Impression #4 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 10)

But I learn from each attempt.

And I really need to find a place to take pictures of these works that don't always have the glare coming in my dining room window from the left...  Someday.

Autumn Impression #3

Happily playing with paint...

Autumn Impression #3 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 10)

I'm trying to paint something every day. Practice makes better. I hope.

Angry Painting

Sometimes I sit down to paint something nice (why would you intend otherwise?), and the result is just bad. Being human, it's easy to get frustrated, or even downright angry. After the failed painting I posted earlier this evening (which has since been scribbled out and thrown in the trash), I had one of these angry moments.

I picked up a brush and used whatever I had on the palette to do this mess: (the Cowboys were beating the Patriots in overtime at the same time...this didn't help my mood).

Angry Painting, Take 1 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 8)

Yuck. But maybe salvageable. So I cleaned up and defined what I guess might be a tree, and another little tree next to it.

Play Time, Take 2 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 8)

That's a little better. Perhaps if we put these trees on a recognizable ground...

Play Time, Take 3 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 8)

Better still. Maybe at this point, just add some darks to define the trees a little bit better, add some bright greens and yellows to define the ground...

Play Time, Take 4 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 8)

So...a strange evening's painting. I set out intending to do one thing, and hated the result. Got frustrated, splashed some paint around, saw the possibilities in this impromptu mess, and ended up with a little painting that I like quite a bit. A takeaway from this for me to remember is that the final "Take 4" version of this little painting has some incredibly thick paint application, and it works really well...

Autumn Impression #2

Or...Listen to the voice in your head...

The below is a work in progress (?), and has become problematic in a number of ways. I wish I had a picture of what this looked like 30 minutes ago, because honestly, it looked much better back then.

30 minutes ago it was a simple straight-forward autumn sketch of a stream with a tree line in the background and a single focus tree in the left foreground.

Autumn Impression #2 (oils on canvas panel, 12 by 16)

I liked a lot of it for the most part. But maybe not the foreground tree. So a few more brushstrokes. Not helping. Stop. But I can probably fix this with a few more brush strokes. Or not. So maybe a few more. Or touch up the water. Or add more highlights to the distant tree line. And so on. And on. And on.

The funny thing is, with each step along the way, I knew that I should just stop, and that every time I added something I was going to get further away from where I wanted to be. But the urge to fix is hard to set aside.

So onward I went, and this sloppy mess is the result. Once you feel yourself sliding down that slippery slope, one part of you says stop, and one part of you says "but I know I can fix this."

Perhaps not.

After a downward spiral of good intentions, I ruined the foreground tree, then overworked the stream, and then ruined the distant tree line.

I do wish I had a picture of what this looked like a while ago, because it was actually pretty nice back then.

Now...I don't ever see myself going back to this after it dries. This is most likely destined for the trash, and deservedly so.

Live and learn. Maybe. Or maybe not...

Autumn Impression #1

Now that we are getting into the fall season, I expect that I will be doing a lot of autumn sketches, with predominantly browns, reds, yellows and oranges.

Autumn Impression #1 (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 10)

So here's the first of what will likely be many. Many many.

I'm working on this off and on while watching the infuriating Eagles play the Buccaneers on Thursday night football.

Red and Yellow Fields

Here's the aforementioned palette-cleanser, using up the reds and yellows I had left on my palette before scraping it clean and moving on.

Red and Yellow Fields (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 8)

It's bright!!

Sunrise on the Point

I had some pinks and yellows and reds on my palette, so I painted this last night.

Sunrise on the Point (oils on canvas panel, 11 by 14)

I've painted a lot of water in the last year and a half, most of it badly. But I think I'm finally getting better at it. The main thing to remember, which has taken a very long time to get into my thick head, is that water rarely looks blue...

In looking at this now, the one thing I will want to touch up when it dries is to vary the height of the trees. They are too uniform now.

Next will likely be a small hyper-colorful palette cleanser before cleaning up and moving on to something else.

Water Gap Study

Before there was the larger attempt at this painting, there was this small 9 by 12 study.

Water Gap (oils on canvas panel, 9 by 12)

I continue to struggle with the results of a small, quick, spontaneous study versus a larger work. Larger isn't necessarily better....

Late Summer Sunrise

After working on something larger, coming back to a small canvas is always...I don't know...comforting?

Late Summer Sunrise (oils on canvas panel, 8 x 10)

This was primarily an exercise in trying to keep things loose and paying attention to my brushstrokes. I think this was more successful in the center "light" strip and the lower left, and less so in the upper and lower right.

As I look at this photo while writing the post, there are a few things that I don't like at all, and I may try to fix them. For something this small, I generally won't do that, but there are enough things about this that I like such that I feel like an attempted "fix" might be worthwhile.

Against my better judgement, I went back over this one (a half hour after the first pass).

Late Summer Sunrise, take 2...

I think it helped.

Delaware Water Gap, phase 1

I finished the first phase of the Innes-esque tonalist painting of the Delaware Water Gap.

Water Gap (oils on canvas, 18 by 24)

It needs some additional work, but the painting needs to dry completely first, so it will be a week or so before I get back to it.

Working on a larger canvas than I am used to is definitely a different experience. Yet another thing I could use more practice on...

A Painting to be

This is the basic sketch of a painting I hope to work on in the near future. 

Delaware Water Gap (canvas, 18 by 24)

It is a rough copy of a George Innes painting of the Delaware Water Gap, not that far from my home (world-distance speaking...). It will be a yellow and brown and orange tonalist painting. I hope...

Two Trees #3

Some paintings you like, some you don't. 

This one...there's nothing terribly bad about it. But there's also nothing particularly good. So...meh.

Two Trees #3 (oils on canvas panel, 11 by 14)

In its defense, it actually has a good bit of color and contrast, and probably looks better in person than in the picture. On the other hand, nothing jumps out at me when I look at it, so...meh.

But there it is, for better or for worse. Fair is fair.

Two Trees, Abstract #2

I keep telling myself I need to work on a more representational painting, and then I find myself painting a semi-abstract semi-impressionistic thing anyway.

The below is a tonalist landscape using about 4 or 5 colors (burnt umber, burnt sienna, a primary yellow, Charvin's "deep shell" and white, plus I think, a dab of orange).

Two Trees Abstract #2 (oils on canvas panel, 11 by 14)

So I guess, why fight it. Paint what needs to be painted.

I like this one.

And the Centurion primed linen panels from Creative Mark, a Jerry's Artarama higher-end house brand, are very nice to work with...

Desert Bluff

This is another little palette cleanser in oils, on a small 8 by 10 canvas panel.

Desert Bluff (oils on canvas panel, 8 by 10)

These quick little paintings are fun, but I need to get back to planning and executing a larger painting. Doing too many of these little panels in a short period of time starts to feel like a cop out (which it admittedly kinda is...).

Hopefully that would be a new post in the near future.