Oil Portrait: Boy, Dog, and Poppies

 Finished last night. 8 x 10 inches on panel.

None of the photographs I took show the subtlety in the skin tones, but you get the idea...

At the end, I was putting the tiniest amounts possible on the tips of sable brushes and making small adjustments to the shape of the eyes and the highlights and colors on the cheeks, etc.  I am very pleased with the end results, anyway.

Coffee lightfastness test

Here is the result of a light exposure test for drawing or painting with coffee. This ran from March 19 to May 8.

So far, the coffee is relatively lightfast.  I expected much more fading than is evident.

The experiment is continuing.

Oil landscape details

"Early Spring, Floyds Fork at Seatonville Road" oil on panel

16 x 20 inches, finished today after starting it on site last week.  As I stated in a previous post, this was a fairly limited palette. I wish my camera picked up more of the subtlety in the tones in the paint. I am pretty happy with it.  I ended up putting a bit more foliage on the trees than there was in real life, and the scene was actually less colorful than I depicted it, with the exception of the grass on the banks, which was a pretty intense green--something I could not generate with a mix of Naples yellow and ultramarine blue.

Floyds Fork at Seatonville Road

earthtone palette

Did some plein air painting last Friday. I used a limited earthtone palette like last time, with a slight change, substituting ultramarine blue for cerulean blue, and adding red iron oxide. The other colors are ivory black, titanium white, Naples yellow, burnt sienna, and burnt umber.

I didn't finish the painting on site, so worked more at home. I still want to work more. It's not resolved yet. Pictures forthcoming.

Red iron oxide is a monster, by the way. It walks up and punches other paint in the face kyst for laughs.

knife painting - Germantown shotgun houses

This is an oil painting I started about five years ago, and only had it at the underpainting stage before I put it on a shelf in the garage and forgot about it.  I didn't much like how it was coming along.  Finally, a few weeks ago, I pulled it out and used a painting knife to complete it.  It's one of my only knife paintings, and I like the result.  It was, for me, pretty experimental, since I don't have much experience with painting knives.  It was certainly different than the detailed pen and ink work I usually work on, and I want to do more soon.

Plein Air Painting near Floyds Fork

This is a plein air (mostly...) that I just finished. The weather was cold on Friday morning, but forecast to warm quickly, so I got gear together and went out to the Parklands at about noon.  It was a great day to be out, though windy.

I used a limited palette: Ivory black, titanium white, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umber, and cerulean blue.

I finished most of this on-site, but did a little fine-tuning and touching up when I got home.

Floyds Fork Landscape oil painting

This is a commissioned oil painting on panel.  The subject of the commission was actually the bench, which is dedicated to my client's parents.  She wanted to give them a drawing or painting of the bench as a Christmas gift because they are unable to get out to the area much any more.

I initially thought to work on a pen and ink drawing, but it seemed like it would be such a waste of the fall colors that were showing at the time.  A great reason to do an oil painting!

I actually added a little more to this after this photo was taken: a small amount of blue-green glazing to darken the distant foliage behind the trunks on the right edge of the painting. I also used it to add some slight shading and definition to the trunks and a few other areas.

I am pretty pleased with the result.  I'll take another photo of the real-real finished product and a few closeups to post later.

Commissioned oil landscape work-in-progress

Getting near the end...just need to let it dry a few days so I can work over some corrections, refinements, etc.

Small painting of a cicada

This is an acrylic painting I did of a cicada about 15 years ago.  I found it recently in a stack of stuff.  It's about 6 x 10 inches, on museum mat board.

House portrait in pen & ink with watercolor

This one is about 10 x 10 inches

detail:

House portrait in watercolor

This is my first house portrait in watercolor, a medium in which I am getting more interested.  I forget the dimensions -- I think it's about 13 x 19 inches.

Watercolor house portrait

Black cat pumpkin

Painted for the raffle at the Virginia Chance School Fall Festival.

Plein air painting on lunch break

This is the result of several sessions of painting over at E. P. Sawyer Park during lunch. It is acrylic on panel, 10 x 16 inches.

Lunch break plein air painting

This was my second day working on this during my lunch break. Had to work fast! Using acrylics.

Echo Trail landscape - acrylic on panel

Last Friday I painted near Floyds Fork, just off Echo Trail.  It was a beautiful day to be out.  The landscape there is very nice; I will definitely go back for more.

This is acrylic on panel, 16 x 20 inches.  Most of it was painted on site, but then I finished it when I got home with some modifications and “polishing up.”  I cannot remember the last time I completed a painting all in one day.

My neck was sunburned by the time I went home.  It was foolish of me not to bring sun block, but fortunately I was wearing long sleeves and had a ball cap, so it could have been worse.

I joked elsewhere about seeing plenty of wildlife "...and most of it had eight legs and run up my pants."  However, apart from spiders and bumble bees and lots of birds chirping, I didn't encounter much.

in progress

completed

Sycamores by the creek - acrylic on panel

Acrylic on panel. I finished this last night.

School Donor Recognition Wall Art (Mixed Media)

I posted work-in-progress photos of this project here over the summer, and finished it in August. However, it wasn’t until recently that I had a decent chance to get some photos of the finished product.

Late last spring I was commissioned to create artwork to honor donors to a school fundraising campaign.  The school wanted something similar to a tile mosaic piece they had seen pictures of online for a school in another state, depicting a stylized facsimile of the building’s façade with donor names in the windows.  They wanted the finished piece to be around 30 x 40 inches, and it would hang in the school lobby.

I considered attempting to duplicate the sample with a polymer clay mosaic, with lettering embossed in the clay tiles. However, after experimentation, I realized that I just didn’t have the means to emboss scores of names without going through an incredibly slow and mistake-filled process and, besides, I am very inexperienced in working with polymer clay.

So I finally decided to create a textured building exterior using acrylic gel mediums (I didn’t have much experience with various fancy gels, either, but I at least knew my way around acrylic paints and matte/gloss mediums.)

I was still puzzled how I was going to do the names, but I somehow stumbled onto acrylic transfers.  I had never heard of acrylic transfers before, but after a test I decided it might work well for the task.

I worked on panel, and used wood scraps and molding to imitate architectural details.  The stone texture was put on with Golden coarse pumice gel sealed with extra gel medium for durability; the plants are painted polymer clay; and the names are acrylic transferred photocopies.

Considering both size and complexity, this is probably the largest commission I have done and the most technically sophisticated project I have attempted.  I am pretty happy with the results, and the people at the school were, too.

I was very impressed with the Golden gel mediums I used, by the way.  Cool stuff, fun to work with.

Donor recognition art progress

It is coming along, slowly but surely.

Painting gladioluses

I’m working on a commission that I’ve decided to do primarily with acrylics.  I’ve used acrylics for many purposes, and use them frequently, but I actually haven’t attempted many complete “works of art” with acrylics alone.

This is not a photo of the commission work, but rather a smaller painting that I’m working on alongside of it, only in acrylic.  A couple of years ago I did an acrylic landscape that I was not satisfied with; this will be only my second full acrylic painting (not counting murals) since, oh, probably 1987.

This is also my first flower painting since the summer after high school. Ironically, the last floral I painted was also the first full painting I had ever done with oil paints.  I don’t normally go in much for flower paintings, but I love the glads that bloom in our yard each year and have sort of wanted to paint them.  Also, I hear they are popular, and I’d like to have another painting to display at the art fair later this month. (That’s another reason I chose acrylic: oils would never dry in time for the art fair.)