New Art Up

I've finally got all of the work you've seen thus far up in the originals page, and it's all for sale.

There will soon be some new works in progress, so get ready for those.

Hope everyone is having a great new year!

Little Bird Painting

Ok, so I have a song bird painting in the works.  I started it way earlier this day, and will post the finished product tomorrow.  The bird is surely going to be yellow; very bright yellow, in hopes that it will jump off the canvas, visually speaking.  Below are the first few steps I took, before becoming too tired and irritated, simultaneously, and making the wise decision to stop; that is before something undesirable happened.  You will understand my frustrations later, when I show the world the mess I made with one of the branches in this painting. .....erg

Fur for thought:)

In my last post I mentioned that I would be writing about  painting fur and my experiences with it.  First, I think the smoother the surface, the better.  So, it is best to gesso the canvas, sanding between layers to even it out.  I also said that I would be showing my processes as well, so here goes.

I start off by making a very simple, and LIGHT pencil sketch of the subject I will be painting.  My personal preference is to also mark out some color variances.  This is right after I sketched in the bulldog figure, and had been playing around with a few coat colors.

Next thing I did was to put in the basic coat colors, a little bit darker than the true color. I didn't worry about making the fur texture at this stage.

Ok, so here is the finished product.  Details were added here; the eyes, fur texture, nose, highlights.

"Green Bulldog"

Acrylic on canvas

small?

Sorry, not sure on the size of this one, because it's not nearby at the moment.  It is smaller than the 9"x11".  Ok now to talk about the fur, which got it's texture in the final stage.  It's important to note that fur typically moves from top to bottom, and from the center out.  So, to paint fur, because it overlaps, I started from the bottom, worked my way up, and from the outer edges in.  I used a frayed filbert brush to achieve the effect shown.  I kept the strokes very light, and lifted the brush at the end to make the pointed ends seen in reality.  

Thanks for reading:)

Cow and other things.

Hi, everyone.

As I make new discoveries in painting I will be showing them to you, but at the moment I have a month's worth of paintings to show you guys.  Sometimes I find it difficult to decide what to paint, and this requires me to spend a bit of time finding inspiration.  Last month (november) I got lured into painting a few cows.  I have to say I wasn't so keen on the idea at first, but then I found some brahma pics, and I ended up loving the elegant face shape and hanging ears they have.

So here is what came of this.

"Red field, White cow"

Acrylic on canvas board

9"x12"

On a side note, I found a very amazing art blog, that some of you may or may not be familiar with.
http://williamwray.blogspot.com/ << This guy's art is wonderfully colorful, and has a unique quality.  Go check it out, I'm sure you'll find it quite amazing:)

Tomorrow morning, err later this morning, I will be posting two MORE cow paintings.  Bye for now...

Acrylic Adventure

While I catch up on showing you my newest paintings, I've been trying to improve on my color mixing skills.  A painting can be completely abstract or even downright ugly, but if the colors work together, and they are captured correctly, it will catch your eye.  I used to be so focused on the technical aspect of painting, like brush strokes, and glazing, but I could never capture a scene or photo the way I wanted.  Turns out that I needed to learn how to truly understand color.  I had been missing the big picture, no pun intended, on how colors work together in a composition, from reflections, and lighting, to knowing that shadows are definitely not just black.

This acrylic painting is of a brightly colored little street, that seems to have seen quite a bit, completed about a month ago.

"Yellow City"

Acrylic on Canvas

11"x14"