The main project I have going now is a big painting of a deer skull hanging on a fence. The light was great that day, sharp and wintry, the shadows on the skull were bright blue and the grasses were grey and gold.
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| Deer Skull, 16x20, preliminary drawing for a painting. |
Laying out the drawing and doing the transfer to the painting board was tedious, but it's finally done. I also decided to leave out the fence post and the tag on the right antler.
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| Deer Skull testing color schemes for a painting. |
Picking the colors is the next part, I want to do glazes of pure color over most parts of the painting. Glazes will glow and be intense, but that means all the colors have to be right from the beginning. First I tried Pthalo Blue, Indian Red, Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, and Vandyke Brown (the bigger sheet on the left). But the problem with Vandyke Brown is that it tends to look dead and gross when it mixes with white or yellow, and is hard to get dark enough because it's so transparent. So I tried again with Raw Umber, which is about the same color as Vandyke Brown, but plays nicely with other colors and is nice and dark. And I switched the Indian Red for Permanent Rose, because that makes a nice pretty purple with the blue and it will work on the parts of the shadows that look pink too. Currently I'm thinking Pthalo Blue, Permanent Rose, Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White will be the way to go.
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| Hall House Deer Skull, pencil on Bristol paper, 5x7, unfinished. |
I also have a few small pencil and pen drawings floating around. This is another whitetail deer skull, from the tree in the backyard at my grandma's house.
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Thistle, pencil on Bristol paper, 5x7.
Another small drawing, of a thistle seed pod in the winter. I haven't decided whether to use copic pen or pencil yet, maybe both. |
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| Beach Shells, oil on Gessoboard, 5x7, unfinished. |
Still working on the little sea shell picture, mostly frustrated with it though. I haven't figured out how to get the sand to look right, and the orange shell is a mess. Some areas are too dark and opaque, it looks blotchy, and I think I might need to repaint most of it to fix it. I used Neo Megilp on Gessoboard and ran into an issue with previous layers wiping off when I tried to scrub in the next color. Maybe sealing the layers with Galkyd Lite might be the way to go. Gamblin used to say not to mix their mediums, but now they say everything can be used together, so maybe I'll ask what they think before I try that.
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| AZ Blue Sky, 5x7, oil on a canvas panel, probably finished. |
A little painting from a picture my mom took somewhere out near Big Lake, Arizona. I keep messing with it, but it's probably done now.
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