Brothers 3

My wonderous nine month old grandson arrived here on the 26th to stay while his parents are in Japan. Skype is a wonderous thing even when the connection falters. We will return him to Portland on the 3rd, have a nice reunion and come home on the sixth.  THEN I will paint again.

Until then here's what happened on the painting of the brothers.

I started defining the background with some tree branches and leaves, lightening the area behind the taller boy's head and breaking up the big dark space on the left. I also lightened the tops of the rocks to keep that lighter diagonal moving.

Here's the squinty eye take on how the values are working out according to my plan which is still visisble in the background.

Had to spend some time on these beautiful faces before I ended this session. I think I've caught the younger- now if I can just keep my brushes OFF, except for his hair which needs work.

At the end of this session I realize than in my desire for a light diagonal I have made the water look like milk.  Ah, three steps foward, two steps back.  And so it goes.

The next day I take the dog and return to Beaver Creek, where this idylic scene began. The water does not look like milk; it is a mirror.

With my new reference photos I rework the water. It's better and I look forward to retrning to this painting.

Happy Halloween!I'll be back in November.

Brothers 2

One of the things that happens when I take photos of a painting's progress is that I don't always have the  camera on the same setting. If I use the auto I get much cooler colors than if I shoot with manual settings. So don't think the color is swinging wildy, it's probably just the camera. 
Here's where we left off:

Wow! There's the color shift I was talking about!  Here I'm thinking about the size and angle of the bow and arrow and not liking that they are parallel to each other.

Let's indulge in slightly smaller brushes ,change the angle of the arrow and work on the boys...

The skin tones are a challange. I have a tendancy to add too much white and I'm thinking at the end I will probably add an orche glaze to warm things up a bit.  It IS summer, after all.  the faces are starting resemble

their owners.

 A little more definition in the rocks. I've put in about 4hrs...we'll call it good for the day.

Brothers

The Roses were a good warm-up; this week I'm on to the painting for my niece. I'm doing this from a photo which I will not post in it's original form because it was taken about 8 yrs ago and one of my grand-nephews is not so happy about anyone seeing this image of him naked!!! ( He's threatened to sue if I do the painting, but I'll take my chances.)
 The first thing was to change the color photo to a high contrast black and white to get better see the big shapes.

Next I added on to the left side to make a better composition. A general guide is to have the center of interest be at the junction of the painting's thirds. I've drawn lines here so you can see that the lines cross near the boy's faces. In the original shot their faces were close to center. The re-do has more drama, don't you think?  The red spots were an idea about having them gathering fruit or something, but I abandoned that idea for metaphor about brothers which came a little later.

This brought me to the point of a rough in on the 24" x 24" canvas. I projected the image and made a quick charcoal sketch of the main elements.  (There is lots of controversy about weather it is "OK" to do this, which I don't care much about. I think the main issue is that people use images that are taken by others, project them as is and then put paint on it. The composition, color and subject were all done by someone else so the result is hardly "original". Not the case here so I am guilt-free.)
I sprayed the sketch with fixative and let it dry overnight, then I did a quick color wash with ochre acrylic.

Then...I chickened out and painted the October Roses.

A few days later I came back to the Brothers and did another color blocking with acrylic. I chose the violets and blues because I thought they would give and interesting under tone to the greens, and yellows and pinks I planned to use. By this time I was hot to get going and the thin acrylic allowed me to do that because it dries so fast. If I'd used oils, even thinned with turp, I would have had to wait a day rather than an hour. Oils can go over thin acrylic, but acrylic over oils will peel off.

Here's how it went:

I'm including my reference photos in these shots so you can see if I'm sticking to the plan as I go along. Having them on the wall behind the easel helped me just look at the the shapes and values, not any detail.



These are the brushes I'm using. No need for any details at this stage! The sketchy marks are the bow the smaller boy will carry and the arrow his brother is holding. The angle of the arrow should stop the eye from following the arm right our of the picture.
Do you get the metaphor?

A check with this black and white at the end of the day shows me I'm losing the strong light diagonal, from bottom left to upper right. I'll have to keep an eye on that as I proceed.

October Roses

Look who is back in her studio! It was a short summer and a long fall, but enough is enough. It's time to start painting again! 

I did the rough-out of a painting I've been promising my niece for about a decade but felt I needed a warm up before I could dive into it.  A couple of days ago Dennis shooed one of our resident triplet fawns away from my favorite rose bush so I decided to cut some for us to enjoy before they disappeared. They were on our breakfast nook table in a blue glass vase and since all I wanted to do was stare at them and breathe their sweetness I decided to paint them. This was bold decision. Flowers, especially roses, are hard to paint (for me anyway) and they only behave for a day at most before they droop and fade and you can't figure out why that shape you thought you'd nailed doesn't seem to be there anymore. BUT they were SO pretty...and so I began. Here's how it went:

Keep it loose...find the big shapes...define the color scheme ( complimentary: yellow-violet). Was SO happy to be painting again! Lunch, siesta, and back again...

 The black and white photos help me monitor the values.

starting to get droopy!

Got to stop. I'm SO tired. I can see that the flowers don't have enough change in value to give them any volume but I have no more energy and the light is totally different. I set the vase outside hoping at least the bud, which is my focal point, will still be recognizable in the morning.

Next day. I painted for a while before I remembered to take any photos. Got some darker tones into the blossoms and juiced up the background, defined some of the leaf structures.

 

I feel pretty good about this knowing that in a couple of weeks, when it is dry, I'll take another look and probably do some glazing and brighten some highlights.  I'll post again when it's finished. In the meantime there's that other one I started... and I feel braver now.