"Three Roses" Final

Darkened a few areas, lightened a few, you know the drill. Anyways, that's all she wrote on this one.

"July 5" Poster and Ebauche

The poster study is on a 5"x7" canvas board and the ebauche is on an 8"x10" stretched linen. I decided to combine the wipeout with the ebauche on this one. Mostly because theres so much color involved but also because I'm not completely satisfied with painting over the wipeout (no colors to compare) and I'm not big on doing an ebauche on a pale ground because I feel that the colors end up looking too chalky and putrid and it puts me off. I'm digging the combination of the two a lot better and if this works out I may stick with it.

"Moth" Complete

The figure is from life and the background is completely imagined. It was tough to get then to relate, what helped a little was using a limited palette. It was fun and I'll probably try again when I'm feeling inspired to do so.

"Roses and Dipper"

The metal dipper was pretty intense and took a lot of stepping back and forth. I'm guessing it's a dipper, I'm not really sure what the heck it is! The paintings a little lighter than it looks here, I'll have to do some photoshop work when it's all done. I have a wierd color combo for metal; Ivory Black, Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre and White. Not sure how I came up with it, but it seems to work and it's a good base to put other colors into when the metal is reflecting or absorbing.I should be able to finish the first pass tomorrow and then wait a week for touch-ups. I'm itching to get started on that fireworks painting.

"More White Roses"

Got back to my rose painting. I'm trying to gradually diminish the intensity as the light travels from left to right. The first rose is practically whited out in intensity and the small vase is fairly subdued in comparison. I didn't make a poster for this one so I'm kind of deciding things as I go along. One thing I'm getting is that it's a lot easier to make a light tone darker than a dark tone lighter, so it's better to err on the side of brightness.

"Paint Out" Day 2

Fortunately it didn't rain. I ended up having to paint at the same spot. What to do? I thought about focusing in on some shoreline rocks but then I caught sight of this view. The only problem was the shoal and tall grass mound were on the right side. Not easily discouraged I took Carlson's advice and decided to put them where I wanted them. I kept the background and distant boats greatly simplified to keep the eye on the foreground-middleground area. I actually like this one better than the one I did yesterday, but yesterdays painting was framed and submitted for the auction which takes place at Gallery North on Sunday.

Paint Out

"Along Shore Road" oil on linen, 8"x10"

I'm painting this Friday and Saturday, along with a bunch of other artists in Gallery North's "Wet Paint Festival", which is a plain aire paint out in honor of Joseph Reboli (deceased). Thanks to Frank Serrano, John Budicin and Kevin Mcpherson, not to mention Carlson's guide to landscape painting, I feel like I'm starting to understand some of the theory that goes into plain aire painting. Once I had my basic value pattern established I tried to keep the strength of that right to the end. That forced me to compress the values in any given area and to make color changes without necessarily changing the value. I also considered the form of each thing that I was painting and I tried not to just replicate value changes but to roll the forms up to the light. Anyways, I'm a little happier with this one. I get to try again tomorrow (supposed to rain) and then the paintings will be auctioned off.