Storm Clouds 3/11/16

This was the view out my office window a few months ago, one nice and half stormy afternoon. I tried to enhance the sense of depth in the painting, fixing what the photo lost. The photos I took looked flat, and lost how the layers of clouds moved into the distance. Some parts were also messy in the photos, so I moved clouds around and took some out.

Storm Clouds 3/11/16, oil on panel, 6x12 inches, finished.

Here's the progression from sketch to finished painting. This painting was done with no medium in the bottom layers, so the paint would stay wet and be blendable all day. The top layers did need a little Neo Megilp medium added to give transparency to the color, and make very thin glazes possible. For instance the blue sky has a very thin layer of pure blue over it that makes the color more intense.   

Storm Clouds 3/11/16, painting process.

I found a new tool to use for the under drawing this time, watercolor pencils. Regular pencil smudges too much to be used under oil paint, because graphite is non-polar just like oil paint, so they're attracted to each other. But I like a detailed drawing to start from and pencil is a natural fit for that because it can be very precise, and faint enough to not show through the paint, unlike ink or charcoal.

Starting sketch with watercolor pencil.

Water-soluble graphite doesn't interact with oil paint, so the drawing stays put nicely. The drawing can be painted over with water too, and the color gets much darker. I tried that at first, in the top left corner of the painting, but it wasn't really helping so I didn't do it anywhere else.

Storm Clouds 3/11/16, detail.

Here's a little detail from the left side of the painting, showing the smudgy grey clouds in the front, cumulus clouds behind them, and the background layers of clouds.
This painting is currently for sale in my Etsy shop here.

Working on This Weekend- 5/17/15

I finished a few little things this week, that's always fun. All three of them are now available in my Etsy store.

Winter Thistle, mixed media drawing on paper, 5x7 inches, finished.

I've been trying to finish up some of the many little drawings that I have floating around, and I started this one quite a while ago. I started the drawing by transferring the pencil outlines, tracing them with pen, and then scrubbing in shading with charcoal. Tracing with pen works nicely, because it doesn't smear or disappear when the charcoal is added over it. After that I refined the dark areas with more pen work, sharp pencils and charcoal, and added in the white highlights with white acrylic paint. 

Beach Shells, oil on panel, 5x7 inches, finished.

This is another picture I gave up on and put away before finishing. But I tried again, and now I think it looks finished. The sand has shape and interest to it, and the shadows on the shells make sense now. 

Dam Sunset, oil on panel, 5x7 inches, finished.

I love the colors in this one, and after a few tries the grasses look good too.

AZ Aspen, oil on canvas panel, 9x12 inches, unfinished.

Still working on this one, I tried another color on the fence, and this time it looks better. The fence and sidewalk at the bottom still need a little more work, but it's close to done.

Geraniaceae Seeds

I have a hard time deciding whether to call these pictures drawings or paintings, but it was an fun experiment, no matter the name. I transferred pencil drawings from photos that I took, painted in the background, shaded in the pencils drawings, painted over the drawings with thin washes of acrylic inks, and then scratched out highlights with a knife. I worked back and forth between the pencil and ink and scratching out whites, Claybord* is great for that because the surface is smooth and deep enough that it can be scratched off a few times without scratching through.

Geranium Seed #1,  pencil and acrylic ink on Claybord, 8x8 inches, 12/2013.

On two of the pictures (#1 and#3) I used multiple layers of acrylic ink to fill in the background, which worked pretty well, it just took a few layers to get even coverage. For #2 I tried acrylic paint, and it wasn't as easy to work with as the ink, it chipped in places when I scratched out the details. The paint also left lines that had to be smoothed carefully, so I'll probably stick with ink in the future.

Geranium Seed #2,  pencil with acrylic ink and paint on Claybord, 8x8 inches, 12/2013

The shine of the pictures made them hard to photograph, I tried several times and had no luck, even going all out and building a black light box didn't help.  Then I realized that I could scan anything small enough to fit on the scanner bed, so I tried it and had great luck.

Geranium Seed #3,  pencil and acrylic ink on Claybord, 8x8 inches,  4/2014.

The seeds are something in the Geraniaceae family, I'm not sure exactly what species because I didn't take pictures of the plants themselves. The seeds were stuck in my socks after hiking at one of the local parks, so I brought them home and took some pictures to work from. They're common Texas wildflowers found near San Antonio, Texas.  The seeds in this family spring out as they dry, launch away, and stab into to things to get themselves dispersed. The amazing thing that I found out when trying to identify them is that the coil changes with the humidity, getting longer when wet and shorter as it dries, and will screw the seed into the ground.

  

I did a little experiment by tracing a dry seed on a piece of paper, soaking it on water and seeing if it expanded any. Turns out that it did expand, after a few minutes, and within half an hour it was back to the original shape. 

Geranium Seed #1,  detail.

Geranium Seed #3, detail. 

Geranium Seed #3, detail.

For more information on the way the seeds explode out and bury themselves, see this paper:
Evangelista D; Hotton S; Dumais J. 2011. The mechanics of explosive dispersal and self-burial in the seeds of the filaree, Erodium cicutarium (Geraniaceae). Journal of Experimental Biology. 214: 521-529. 

*I am not compensated in any way by Ampersand, I just love their products. 

Working on This Weekend-11/23/14

I was stuck working on some little pencil drawing for the last week, because it was too cold outside to spray them with fixative. But Sunday was nice and warm, so I was able to fix them and work on the next layers.

Hall House Deer Skull, pencil drawing with white acrylic highlights,  5x7 on bristol paper, finished.

This drawing is mostly pencil, with a little white acrylic paint to bring out the highlights, and that white paint made a huge difference, the drawing looked pretty flat before the whites were brightened.  

Thistle Seed, pen and charcoal, 5x7 on bristol paper, unfinished. 

 I did the underdrawing for this with copic pen, so the sharp spines wouldn't be blurred by blending the charcoal. Making this look 3D will be my goal, because even the photo looks pretty flat.

Torrit Grey Lady, oil painting, 11x14 on a canvas panel, unfinished.

I've been wanting to paint a figure for awhile now, so I picked a vintage erotica picture to work from. These pictures are old enough that the copyrights have expired, and there are tons that would make beautiful paintings. Also I prefer these "real" figures over the oddly photoshopped anatomy you see in most modern photos. She needs a good name too, but there's time to find the right one.

Deer Skull, oil painting on Gessobord, 16x20, unfinished.  

This is the big picture I'm working on now, and it's slowly progressing. I wasted some time drawing in grass in the background and then losing the drawing when I tried painting over it, but I was trying to figure out how to deal with the grass and I think I'm closer now.  With a mid-tone background I can draw in the light colored stems of grass and add in the darks around that.

Working on This Weekend-11/2/2014

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Oxalis

Wood Sorrel (Oxalis) are some of my favorite plants. They have leaves that look like four-leaf clovers and taste like sour candy, because they're full of Oxalic acid. And they have lots of tiny, delicate flowers almost all year round. But my favorite thing about these plants is their seed pods, when the seeds are ripe and ready to go the pod explodes and launches itty bitty seeds all over the place.

Wood Sorrel leaves and seed pod, you can see the few seeds left that didn't get launched.

This painting didn't work out like I had planned, I was hoping to keep the background just in pencil. But the pencil looked too spotty to me, so I ended up using thick Torrit Grey paint instead.

Oxalis, unfinished,11x14 Claybord wood panel. I started the painting in pencil, and set up the shadows on the flowers. Then I got a flower blossom and matched the paint color to it, because the color in the photo was way off. 

Oxalis, detail, oil paint on 11x14 Claybord wood panel. 

Oxalis, finished, oil paint on 11x14 Claybord wood panel. 

Feo

Feo is a mixed media drawing, made from a few different pictures combined. The majority of the drawing is done with charcoal, sharp dark marks were put in with pen and highlights were done with white acrylic paint. The paper is a soft, heavy light grey paper with deckled edges, sorry I don't have a good picture of the edges at the moment. I really wanted to draw the appaloosa horse (whose name is Feo), so I made up a background to finish out the composition.

Feo, mixed media, 8x15 inches, finished.

Feo, detail of clouds.

Feo, detail of horse.

I really like this picture, so it is currently hanging on the wall in my room. Maybe someday I'll sell it, but for now I like it too much.