Waldron show in December

Waldron show in December
Long time, no post.

This is the poster for an upcoming show I will be in with Wyatt LeGrand in December. Here is a link to the Waldron's site (http://www.ivytech.edu/bloomington/waldron/ ) Here is a link to Wyatt's site (http://www.legrandartstudio.com/) I'm excited to be doing this show. We will be painting all next week starting and finishing in Bloomington and working our way across the south and central parts of the state during the week. If you want to come out to paint or watch, please do. Drop me a line or head to the area and search us out. We will be making large studio work for each of the seven days as well as the plein air pieces created on site.
 

Mileage on the tires

 Today was a fun day of plein air. The weather was perfect, the company was great and I didn't even want to throw any of my paintings away today. I painted with Thom Robinson, Pam Newell and Donna Shortt today. We started at Adrians orchard and after that Thom had to leave. The rest of us went out to whiteland to paint at another artist's house. After all was said and done I had five paintings that didn't turn out awful after getting them out of my carriers upon returning home. The top painting is the first that was completed. There is a yellow trailer with a tire in it, sitting by the parking lot of the orchard that caught my attention. I like the abstract shapes and patterns created when you zoom in on old machinary. The bottom painting was the last done today. After everyone else had gone I was there looking for one more painting before heading out myself. There was an old worn out trail leading back to a group of large trees. Today was fun and got me excited for this weekend. I might not be able to post anything the next couple of days but when I do get something up it will be worth the wait.

Finishing in studio

A while back I posted the top painting after a weekend in crawfordsville. I liked the painting a lot but it still had problems that were unresolved. It has been sitting in my studio for a while now and every day I look at it figuring out what it was that needed to be changed to make it better. The same thing happens to most of my plein air paintings. Rarely have I signed anything while out in the field. Today I didn't feel like taking on a new painting so I got a few down off the shelves and went to work on them. The lower left corner of the painting seemed weak and  not finished to me. A few marks were taken away and a few added. Nothing major was changed. The painting was however photographed outside in natural light and that made a huge difference in color. The dingy yellow light cast from the bulbs doesn't do the pastel pigment justice.

Anyway I have been down and out since Sunday so that's why I haven't been on here. I feel much better now and will resume posting

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.