August 24, 2015

Anime Girls

Acrylic on Panel - 6 x 6 inches

This is a group of young ladies enjoying themselves at the Cherry Blossom Festival earlier this year. Brightly colored wigs were everywhere. This is my entry for the Crowd of People Challenge at Daily Paintworks.

August 20, 2015

Salvation Lake

Acrylic on Panel - 8 x 10 inches

This was getting bogged down with too much tiny detail, so I scraped it off a bit and started attacking it with the palette knife. Then I switched to a bigger brush and kept it loose.

August 19, 2015

Cows

Acrylic on Panel - 6 x 6 inches

I don't usually rearrange many elements if a composition, but the photos I had of the cows in the field were not so great, so I took a scene and simplified it and moved them about. This is my entry for this weeks Daily Paintworks challenge, where you can see some other great cow paintings.

August 17, 2015

Country House

Acrylic on Panel - 8 x 10 inches

I was painting with my dad and we picked this spot because it was shaded from the Summer sun and had some interesting views. This little house wasn't terribly interesting, but I liked the shadows along the road, so I decided to make that a bigger part of the composition. I knew I had to work quickly because of the shifting light, but since it was close to the middle of the day, it didn't really shift all that much. I guess one of the benefits for painting outside of the golden hour.

August 15, 2015

Hydrangea Shade

Acrylic on Panel - 6 x 6 inches

The tops of the flowers where picking up the last light as the sun went behind the house and really asked to be painted.

August 12, 2015

Sonoma Coast

Acrylic on Panel - 5 x 7 inches

In the original version of this, I included the foreground because it had colorful flowers and coastal plants and grasses. In the knife version I did, that area just looked messy and didn't add much, I thought. So I did another cropped in a bit closer.

August 11, 2015

Sonoma Coast Knife

Acrylic on Panel - 5x 7 inches

Donny Hahn is a California landscape painter I admire greatly, and I'm lucky enough to see him and his work at shows in Golden Gate Park.  From a distance I saw his paintings and immediately recognized them as his, but as I got closer, something was different. They were abstracts! He said he returns to abstract expressionism from time to time, but rarely exhibits the work. They were just as colorful as his landscape work, and seemed to be reworkings from the very same palette.

This inspired me to try something similar and I decided to try and create an alternate take of a painting I did a few weeks back. By using the knife only, I pre-mixed some of the major color areas and quickly slathered it on the panel. Much thicker than I usually paint.

If less is more, I think I have a ways to go. This seems too busy and overworked, so I may try again.

August 8, 2015

Mustard

Acrylic on Panel - 5 x 7 inches

The seasons here are still unfamiliar at times. It's all burnt out and dry this time of year. But come the spring everything will be wet and green. And then the wildflowers appear. The first to arrive are the mustard flowers which blanket most of wine country. It's one of my favorite times of the year and the hot dry season we're in now had me thinking about Spring.

August 7, 2015

West on Grove IV

Acrylic on Panel - 30 x 30 inches

I've taken a lot of time to ponder the good and bad points of the  previous versions I've painted of this scene, and decided to emphasize the foggy San Francisco quality of light, and to keep it quite loose. When I got to the cars I was finding it hard to not put detail in, but for the rest of it I managed to keep it vague. I used only two brushes, both of them one inch wide.

August 4, 2015

Barn Diva

Acrylic on Panel - 8 x 10 inches

This is Barn Diva, a place in town with great food, but you can never get in because they seem to be booked for wedding related events all the time. But you can stand out in the street and paint it.

August 2, 2015

Rusty Pool

Acrylic on Panel - 8 x 10 inches

Another attempt at THAT tree has produced "different" results. The highlights are special. The rest is not.