Fresh and Green

The other painting

The painting above, Fresh and Green, is one of the other paintings that got me into the Indiana artist club. I recently finished a large studio painting based off of this work. This painting has a lot of design work involved and isn't particularly true to the exact scene that was in front of me. It was more about the patterns I was seeing and trying to organize it in a way that made sense to me. There was so much happening in the lower half of the scene that it had to be edited down and re-arranged to be an attractive showing of what was there. I'm a fan of visual rhythm. If I see shapes that repeat it doesn't matter what the subject material is. It could have been cars, boats, dogs, etc.., as long as it is has a flow. Anyway I need to get back to work. I am doing line and marker drawings of people using a a couple of websites. http://www.artsyposes.com/index, http://lovecastle.org/draw/. Check them out.

A rolling rhythm

What I've been up to

Since my last post

- Finished the plein air week with Wyatt
-Won Outstanding pastel at the Hoosier Salon
-Accepted into the Indiana Artist Club
-Paintings accepted into the Minnetresta: Art about the land show
-just got whipped by two paintings today

The last one is all I have been thinking about since putting down the brush today. I need to come up with a game plan if I'm going to start painting the figure and portraits. They both started so  promising. The drawing and composition was good enough, but after putting the brush down with color it was a slow motion train wreck. In a strange way it feels good getting kicked around by the painting process. It makes me think harder about what I'm doing. I will add figuring out the figure to my giant list of things to learn. 

The picture above is one of the paintings that got me into the Indiana artist club. "A rolling rhythm" I should start posting about the week long plein air adventure next, whether I do or not will be discovered shortly.

Painting at Garfield Park

This morning I went to Garfield Park and painted. I got there around 8 this morning and there were only runners and people walking their dogs around the park. The wind was strong and while waiting for the first painting to dry the wind caught it and ripped it off of the easel. Thankfully I caught it before it went across a large parking lot. That would have been a good way to ruin the day before it began. For the most part it was calm the entire time I was there. I got a few questions like typical but nothing wild or rude. There were actually a few people that had some interesting stuff to say about the park that made me want to return later on.

This first painting was of a group of trees that overlapped and stacked on each other from an angle that I liked. The front tree was lighter and naturally stuck out, so it seemed fitting to showcase it. The spacing and rhythm of the trees from this angle was pleasing to me and the hill they sat on and the path in front of them all fit well together. There were a lot of things I would like to paint in this park so look for more paintings in the future from Garfield Park.

Full weekend in plein air

 After yesterday's poor turnout I decided to go out again today and see if I could get some good paintings in before the weekend was over. For some time now I have been telling myself to document my painting process for my own learning purposes and to help others. Today I luckily remembered to document part of a painting that emphasized an important part of my process. When I plan out a painting the first thing that I do is turn everything I see into large abstract shapes. Then those shapes are combined until I gain 4 or 5 large shapes which I assign values based on creating the illusion of depth and for composition purposes. Sometimes it turns out successful.

Anyway today I got situated on a sandbar down in a creek and painted looking through a silhouette of trees onto this hillside that was lit up with sunlight. The tree that attracted my attention the most was the tree in the mid right that was standing straight up against on top of the bank. It was standing there with the hill as its backdrop just asking to be painted. As you can see in the top photo refrence I had blocked in all the main masses and was beggining to do detail work in the top shape when I decided to take a photo for analyzing the progression later on. It was taking this picture in black and white that helped me realize where I needed to go next. As you can see there is a lot of contrast between the trees and the hillside like I wanted. The problem is the contrast was so just as strong against the other trees which drew attention away from the focal tree. The best way to fix this was to darken the background trees behind the hill to lower the contrast on the trees to the left and right of the focal tree and this also helped with a few other things as well. First it helped the hill to really shine. When the background trees were the same value as the hill the entire top third of the painting was so bright that the hill didn't stand out. Adding the slightly darker value above the hill helps push the eyes back into the painting when they wander up the tree silhouettes. The other thing darkening the top did was to blend the edge of the other trees slightly so the focal tree has the hardest edges giving it the look at me treatment. I would advise anyone that has a digital camera to take it with them and record their progress as they go. Do this in color and black and white. Who knows what you might find out about your painting by just taking a picture of it.

This is another painting from today. It turned out to be more abstract than I had planned. There were tons of trees coming out of this gigantic bush(which was actually just a bunch of smaller trees). I liked the way the large trees came through the top and were all lit up from above casting down filtered light onto the smaller trees.

Edinburg paint out

 Yesterday I failed to post anything so today I am showing two of the plein air paintings from the Edinburg paint out. Last night was spent going through all my hard pastels and breaking down the large pieces to manageable sizes, thinning duplicates, and rearranging them. The two paintings shown here were the last two that I did today. This wasn't a great day but I've had far worse painting outside. This morning it was extremely foggy. The check-in was at 8 but sunrise was at 7 so I got there at 6. There was no sunrise. All the street lights went off and it got lighter, but I still couldn't see anything that wasn't directly in front of me. After I made it home and was cleaning up a lightbulb went off. Break down everything into as few of shapes as possible. The paintings that im not showing are from a creek and instead of breaking everything down to as few as shapes as possible I tried to paint everything that I saw. That is almost impossible with pastels at the size I'm painting. These last two were out in the open on farmground and I'm not sure if it was me starting to come into it or painting these scenes often that made me do it, but I followed that advice. For now on the mantra will be followed and we will see what that does to my work.

Painting Skies

Today I went with another landscape element that is one of the most if not the most important part of a painting, the sky. This particular study was practicing a sunset. I like the wispy clouds and how they are darker than the sky. Typically when I do skies the clouds are the lightest things on the paper. Usually they are negative shapes while the sky is a positive shape but these are backwards. After doing the studies I realized that I should have added some rocks but that was after the fact. Also these sky studies are only 5x7 so it is hard to really get rocks and sky into the same painting unless the rocks are huge boulders or rock faces. Which could have been easily the case if I had thought it out ahead of time. Tomorrow I will practice a new landscape element and try and do a larger study piece at the end that combines rocks, a sky, and the new element.

Kentucky Hills under paintings

 In yesterday's post I mentioned borders was having their store closing sale. Last night they had taken the prices down even further. I bought Richard McKinley's Pastel Pointers. I follow his blog on the artist network and have been wanting to get his books for a while now and with one on sale decided to pick it up.
If you look at his work the first thing you might notice is the under painting that shines through his pastel application. I've been using under paintings for my pastels for a while but only using pastels with turpenoid for the medium. Today seemed like a good day to try a watercolor under painting, so I did two of them. The first was one that I wanted to finish with watercolor and the second with pastel. He talks of arranging shapes in value masses that way you don't jump around the painting and exaggerate certain areas to an extreme. The reason I chose to do the under painting that would be finished in watercolor first is because while the pastel under painting is drying the watercolor painting can be quickly finished in a loose style. Then when the watercolor is done you can start on the pastel already warmed up. This seems like a good strategy for now and I will use this for plein air until I'm burned out.

This is the watercolor under painting for the watercolor finished painting. The thought behind this was to get everything massed in while staying at the lighter end of the value scale for the masses that way they could stay as highlights and be darkened where needed. I like the way the hills roll down in Kentucky. It reminds me of the car trips to see my mothers side of the family. I think the dark value masses frame the rolling nature of the hills well in this painting.

This is the under painting for the pastel that I will eventually get to during the second half of this round of paintings. I tried to get at the average value for the masses on this one. Also the value map changed on this under painting from the previous. I decided to push the tree above the foreground trees back to showcase it. The shape of it was interesting as it was the only one that fanned out and let a lot of the hillside behind it shine through.That will be a lot easier for me to show with pastels at this point than watercolors so i went that way in this painting.

Anyway if you are a fan of McKinley's I would recommend getting the book. Most of the stuff on it can be found on his blog, but it is nice to have a physical copy to flip through when you need some motivation. Also the DVD included with it was great and the ideas sink faster when you see him explaining them.