Clackamas River Bend

Been painting pretty regularly this week.  I set up a Yann Tierson "radio station" on Pandora.  Incredible music to paint to.  After a while I began to realize that my brush strokes were truly guided by the tempo and mood of the music.  So what music do you paint to?! Would love to hear what music folks find most inspirational with brush in hand.

So here is tonight's painting effort.  I set this painting aside a few months ago and finally decided to pick it up and continue.  This is from a photo I took while hiking with my family and some friends high up on the Clackamas River.  I had to climb up this little hill and push the trees and bushes aside to snap this picture.  Hidden behind the dense forest was this brightly lit bend in the river...twas a nicely hidden treasure!!

Granite - Finished

Finished my granite painting.  Mostly just a few touch ups, highlighting some greens, adding in some flowers flowers, and adding a little more color to the granite as it really was rather colorful with some of the stains from years of wind and rain.  Re-added some of the speckles by just flicking my brush with a little dark brown and a lot of medium. 

So how do a store my left over paints?  I've tried a few things, but what seems to work the best for me and it dirt cheap is just to scrape my colors off my palette and lay them down on a styrafoam plate.  I take another styrafoam plate and place it over the one with the paints upside down and tape them together.   Then I toss this in the freezer.  Keeps my paints for a good week or two.  That big mess of paint is all the mixed paints after a painting session.  Makes for some nice grays.  Anyhow, I got that idea from another painter online somewhere, but I don't recall where.  Twas a good tip!!

Northwest Canyon - WIP

Hmmm, this is definitely work in progress...not sure I can reel this one in, but I'll give it my best shot. It's been a really interesting experiment in producing rich blacks.  Hopefully I can pull off the feeling of depth this canyon has.  The water is going to be tough too as it's very clear so that you can see the boulders in the bottom of this creek, but I still need to show the reflections of the canyon walls and greenery beyond.  Yep, this ones a stretch for me :-)  11"x14" canvas board.

Granite - WIP...almost done...I think

So a quick post of last nights work on my little Granite rock painting.  I think a few more small touch-ups and I'll call her done.  Canvas board 8"x10".

The Magic of Color Mixing...

Past two nights I've been experimenting with a new palette that has many more transparent colors than the one I normally use.  I decided to run through another color table using this new palette and have also been mixing some of the color mixtures themselves to watch the effects.  I'm truly fascinated by color!  Here's a few shots of my "exercises".   When I'm done I'll have a nice set of color charts to reference for real paintins :-

I've already done two tables so those two colors are absent from this table.  This table is mixing Dioxazine Purple with every other color on my palette.

 

 

First Painting of 2011 - Inspired by Dennis Sheehan

Wow!  It's been way too long since I picked up a brush.  This evening I stumbled across some amazing YouTube videos of a painter named Dennis Sheehan with some of the most beautiful music playing in the background.  However, no where on his YouTube channel did he mention the music being played.  So then I remembered a free iPhone app called Shazam.  I quickly downloaded to my iPhone, ran Shazam while the song was playing on my computer and in less than a minute it identified the song title and musician, Yann Tierson.

Watching Mr. Sheehan paint was inspirational to say the least.  His brush just dances across the canvas, very loosely.  Soooo, with kids in bed, Pandora loaded up with a Yann Tierson stream, I tried to paint loosely like I watched Sheehan do.  Being Mr. Perfectionist myself...that was a very hard exercise, but man, how rewarding!!!!  Here's the result.  Canvas board 8"x10".

Happy New Year!

Just couldn't let 1-1-11 go by without at least posting a something.  Took two weeks off for the holidays...what a way to end 2010.  So much fun!  Santa brought me some new Sennelier oil pastels - the 24 landscape pastels and some watercolor pencils.  Haven't done much with colored pencil, let alone watercolor pencils, but I thought I might try using those as an underpainting for some OPs. 

Hope everyone had a great and safe New Years and here's looking forward to 2011!  Will post more paintings soon!