Saturday, March 31, 2007

March 31 - Trail Ride and 90% Finished Horses

After a six hour ride up and over the mountain behind my studio, I came home with one tired mare, and a bit achy myself. Organized trail rides can be great fun, unless you end up behind a complete idiot, which I did for part of this ride. Makes for some very challenging moments, however my mare came through fine. Today's ride was a good one for a pre-ride for the one I'm leading next month. Knowing how tired my mare is, I can easily see her in this painted pasture, resting with her buddies, glad to be home. So the painting progresses with real-life experience to back it up.


That said, tonight's work on the 11 x 14 acrylic brought it almost to completion, with the light just about in place, and with tweaking that will not majorly change it to come on the morrow. Most of the added paint is in the form of glazed layers, with come opaque areas created to bind and unify the colors and composition. Playing wiht the layers and texture in the foreground will come next, as will the dust, which is only partly in place right now. Fun!

Complete lesson here.

Friday, March 30, 2007

March 30 - Acrylic Backlit Horses, 11 x 14 Lesson Painting

Here's the second step in my painting process using acrylics. I go for the darks, laying in the abstract structure with value contrast and not worrying about edges at all. It is a lot of fun painting with different colors over the underpainting--one person said it reminded her of the cave paintings!
You can see the values and the backlighting coming to the fore as I put umbers, alizarin crimson, untramarine blue and yellow ochre mixes creating the value structure. I am not looking at any source material at this point--letting my innate design sense tell me where to put those darks.

Complete blog here.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

March 29 - Beginning a Lesson Acrylic 11 x 14

I have had so many people inquiring about the upcoming acrylic lessons DVD that I can do no less but give you a lesson on how I handle acrylics. Although this one won't be in the DVD, you can certainly enjoy how it comes together. The first layer of this 11 x 14 canvas board is covered with soft gel medium mixed with a couple of colors to make a more neutral red orange, and then before it is dry, patted with a wad of plastic wrap to give it interesting texture, both real and illusionary. Those peaks of gel medium are then gently wiped away as it begins to dry, to keep the actual texture under control.
The second layer is again a mixture of soft gel medium, but this time with two blues. Only bits and pieces of these two layers will show through the final painting, but they will be ever so much more exciting than plain white canvas!
I now take a brush handle and sketch in the location of the horses, their shadows and the landscape shapes that will define this painting. It will be another pastoral scene, backlit, as I'm enjoying them immensely. (Perhaps that's because I've done with taxes and it isn't as bad as I'd feared?) No matter, painting is solace, rejuvenation and pleasure. Houseguest Betty Billups is up near Walnut doing her mural for the next couple of days, so life here is full of her paintings, but without her joyful personality.

Congratulations to Lorna McPhee of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on acquiring yesterday's Belted Galloway acrylic! Thank you!

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

March 28 - Belted Galloway Cow, 5 x 7 Acrylic

I really liked that pastoral painting of the two cows a couple days ago so since it is late and I'm a tad tired, I decided to just do a smaller version. But not the same, for that wouldn't be as interesting as changing the cow. So now we have a small black and white "Oreo" cow, called a Belted Galloway--an interesting breed, brought to my mind by one of the list artists in wood and who lives in Pennsylvania. He does the Belteds on wood for a niche market and has shared with me his process. So now a Belted Galloway comes full circle! SOLD.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

March 27 - A Rose is a Rose 5 x 5 acrylic

A Rose is a Rose, and yet this one isn't really... it is done from a nicely colored SILK rose, yet it has done a Pinocchio-come-to-life under my brushes. This is a 5 x 5 inch acrylic, matching in texture the earlier peony from a week or so ago.

It is done wiht thin veils of dark values beneath and behind the flower, which is painted with white and other opaque pigments to have it float on the surface of the canvas. I learned this method from Al Brouillette back in the mid 80s. He has passed away, but his artwork and spirit lives on with his teaching.

This painting is available from my ebay store.

Monday, March 26, 2007

March 26 - Still Life with Betty Billups

Dueling Brushes!! Betty Billups and I laughed ourselves silly while we set up and painted these sunflowers tonight, starting at 8:30 tonight and finishing up an hour later. What fun!

We were painting kinda in the dark in the big studio, and both of us did 16 x 12 oils, each in our own style. Here's Betty's painting, full of THICK paint!



Mine will be going up on my ebay store in a couple days, but right now I'm HUNGRY! Painted right through dinner time!

Sunday, March 25, 2007

March 25 - The Pastoral Cow Painting Finished

You can see that I kept the grays intact for this one, and held to the complimentary color scheme of purple and yellow green and the mid range of values. The highest value contrast comes in the vicinity of the cows, so that holds your eyes, and there is an implied line created by the direction of the cows (the way they are facing) that brings the viewer into the scene, and allows one to "visit" with the rest of the composition.
This original painting is available for $295 as an 11 x 14 original on my ebay store.