Digital Finger Paint on iPhone
I added the nifty application Brushes to my iPhone. This is a quick sketch I did while traveling to test it out. It pales in comparison to some of the provided samples. If you're interested, check out the examples on their website.
One artist actually did a cover for the New Yorker using this app.
Marker on Paper
Back in town and ramping up for painting...
Well, at least I'm sketching again. Paintings will be coming soon. Very busy doing that thing that pays the bills at the moment.
This is a sketch of a local street scene that I really want to paint. Hopefully soon. I live on "the Wiggle" which is a series of dedicated bicycle lanes/paths that worms its way through the neighborhood, on its way to Golden Gate Park.
A quick sketch from a photo from this Summer. (ah, remember Summer?)
I was trying to work in some things I've been learning about depth, distance and perspective. Tryin' I tell ya.
Naturally, there's gonna be a bit of a lag in posting again, due to the season, holidays etc. And if Santa brings me an xBox, then all bets are off.
All the best, Gringo.
Marker on paper
I have been absent for a while, but this should give a clue as to my whereabouts. Didn't bring paint, 'cause I knew there'd be no time, but I did manage a few sketches. It was driving me a little nuts not to have my paints with me. Not only was there no end of wonderful things to see, but I went to a lot of great museums too.
Now that I'm back, painting will resume tonight.
Ah, yes. Plenty of paint already mixed out into little puddles on the palette, so I thought I'd distill the last composition into some basic shapes, keeping relative placement – the distance is less rich in color, the barn face the brightest and warmest. I could do these all day, though I'm not sure I'd gain anything by it.
I have a lot of reference photos from this ranch, so I thought I'd see if I could work on the values and color temperatures for this one. The light was changing rapidly while I was there, but this shot captured a lot of those different values. The sky in the back was grey and cloudy, but the sun had suddenly poked through warmly flooding the foreground. It's probably one of those kind of scenes that an instructor might steer you away from, but it really does remind me of the weather that day.
Thought I'd see about updating another old painting to see where I could take it. I realize that it is more common than not to go back to a painting again and again, but this is a new phenomenon for me. I usually try to get it all in one go, rarely returning to add or edit anything. The funny thing is I will critique and criticize my finished pieces, I just rarely ever feel like fixing them.
The second piece here is the update. Bluer shadows, calmer sky. The photograph isn't that good. (The darks aren't really that solid and filled in the way they appear here).
I stumbled on this panel, that I'd painted about a year ago. I couldn't help but notice that it looked quite washed out, and there weren't any real dark darks. So, I thought I'd just paint over the piece and see if it would be improved by beefing up the contrast.
I don't know that it wound up any "better", but I do like the increased contrast and the better definition of cool shadows. I might try this with a few other close failures from last year. Should be interesting.
This month's Different Strokes assignment. Go have a look and you can see what the original image is and how everyone else is interpreting it. I decided to go with fast and loose. Surprise.
A dull foggy morning in Sonoma, but a few of us set up in hopes that the sun would appear. Angela Fabela from the Monday Morning Painters was with us and he pointed out this small building to me.
What I liked about it was that there was a lot going on in the foreground, but that the rest of it went way back to the woods. Looking at the results, it kinda wound up flatter than I'd hoped. It's probably because the detail and size of brushwork is the same throughout. Hmmm.
This months Different Strokes from Different Folks assignment. I was really hoping to do something a little more abstract, and that's how I started, but I forgot to stop and put in a lot more detail than I intended. Take a look at the other entries. There's one by Jill Donahue that better captures what I was imagining, and lots of other great ones, including another superb piece by the host, Karin Jurick.
With 20 minutes left on the clock, I decided to try another composition. As a bonus, the sun had just come out, so I tried to get that contrast between what was in light and what was not. Having spent the whole morning painting in very flat light this was a little more fun. (oh, I'll be posting that one next).
And those "special effects" in the foreground came from packing it up before it was really dry enough, and having it stick to another board, and then separate badly. A rare experience when painting acrylic in Sonoma while it's still in the high 90's.
For a change, I decided I'd try to paint colors and not shapes (whatever that means). So, I didn't do a sketch on the canvas, but rather started putting in color areas. By the halfway mark, I'd really wished I had put some shapes in first. I couldn't tell which post I was painting (or around which) and I also wound up with the result of the fields behind the fence looking like they were on the same plane as the patio. Bad, bad, bad.
Still, no one was physically harmed, and something might have been learned. At least the colors are pretty intense, which is good, since that's the language I was trying to use.
No, I never got around to putting the clock-face in. I didn't feel like the rest of it was going well enough to warrant one.
I'm discovering that by using a green I really like, right from the tube, that I'm not getting enough variety in my greens. This is a perfect example of that lazy behavior. I'm gonna try mixing my greens from scratch more often from now on. If I remember.
I found myself in a landscape setting I was bored with, so instead of painting my immediate surroundings, I picked one distant hill as my subject. It was early in the morning (a time of day I rarely see) so the hills were the same fiery orange they are at sunset, though unlike sunset, they get lighter and brighter as you sit there and you find you're questioning your initial swathes of orange.
This is a copy (sort of) of someone else's work. It was basically a challenge issued to try and see if their style could be deciphered. Well, even though the colors are pretty close, as is the composition, the brushstrokes reveal the lie. I'm not even close.
I guess you can play Jimi Hendrix's songs, but you can't play 'em like Jimi.
I've been bad. I've been absent.
I have a volume of excuses, none of which are are interesting or pertinent.
Let's just chalk it up to... well... a lapse. It happens.
I'm back online and with a vengeance.
Gracias, all.
This is a thin slice of the mission at Santa Inez, I think.
I was inspired by seeing some Georgia O'Keeffe paintings at MOMA. There were a lot of her pieces that broke all the commonly held conventions of composition – just a tiny sliver of sky, a close-up of an architectural detail, a centered subject etc.
I joined the Monday Morning Painters at Spring Lake in Sonoma. It always amazes me how much the surface of the water changes from minute to minute. I guess you just have to pick one moment in time and keep it in mind (along with the color of the sky, the temperature of the atmosphere, the direction of the shadows etc. etc. etc. Easy, right?)
Here's another artists take on the scene (unfinished).
Having recently sold two versions of similar paintings, I went back to my reference photos and decided to try a larger one. Much larger. 30 x 10 inches. I just made sure to not use anything smaller than a half-inch brush, and tried to rush along and keep things loose and fresh.
I think I need a little more room to be able to back up from something this large while I'm painting it.
