Painting with Friends in Morgan Hill

I went painting in Morgan Hill with some old SJSU friends: Noah, Jackson, Dela, Nikki, Kendelle, Scott, and Jules. I managed to paint this old building in downtown. I'm finding architecture a bit of a struggle to create in plein air, but I plan to keep working on it. I think the secret is to treat it as shapes and colors just like anything else rather than try to do an architectural rendering in such a short time.

More paintings...

I did some outdoor painting in the Berkeley hills with Noah, Jackson, and Daniel last weekend. The top two pieces are what resulted. On the first piece I had the challenge of simplifying enormous amounts of visual information. It was pretty difficult and I learned a lot from it. For the second, my painting of the hillside was pretty dead and wasn't going anywhere, so I took inspiration from Noah's recent pushing of his artwork and decided to do the same with this one, taking it in a whimsical direction. I don't think I'd ever done anything quite like that before. The third painting was done the next day in my own backyard.

The last two paintings are the same ones from my previous post, but with more work added to them. I thought they had a lot of potential as pieces to put in the gallery, but felt they needed a bit more pizzaz. For the dirt road I brought out more of the colors in the shrubbery and developed the shadows more. I originally created the Monterey coastal cliff image just to practice rendering the rocks and didn't pay much attention to the composition at the time. As such, I felt the composition was too blandly horizontal and lacked a focal point. I added some opposing mass to it in the form of the kelp forest and added some interest with a cute little sea otter. I think people visiting Salinas/Monterey will like that. How can you resist one of those cute little fellas?

More plein air landscapes

After some busy weeks, I finally have time to update my blog. Here are some new plein air pieces I've done lately. I'm getting ready to do a lot more outdoor painting now that the weather's nice. I'm getting back into practice. I got a guerilla painter outdoor setup, which makes things much easier. It was a bit of a cluster*$&$ to do it the way I was doing it before. I've done about 10 or so lately and the first few were really bad. I'm only showing the good ones here. I think I'm all warmed up by now.

The first three were done on location then finished from photos that I took at the scene. I tried to just bring them to completion at home and not add too much extra information to them. I'm definitely learning that photos completely flatten the scene and kill the color. Not only that, they make the color choices for you, whereas when your on location, the colors sort of vibrate and change depending on adjustments your eyes are making to the environment.

The last painting was done very quickly with the intention of making it look good on-location, rather than depending on any studio work to bring it to completion. I've been making a lot of attempts at that and this one's halfway decent, but not quite there yet. That's really tough. I'm going to keep studying painters that are really good at quickly suggesting detail and make successful and aesthetically pleasing "quick reads" of scenes. I think it's a good skill to have. I plan to be posting some Photoshop paintings soon as well.

Painting with the flu

Well, right now I've got the worst flu I've had in years, so I can't really leave bed - but I can still do some digital painting. I thought this turned out pretty good. It's the view I'm stuck with of my bedroom. Maybe I'll try to paint some stuff on TV next.

Sunset in Big Sur

This is a new painting I did for the Salinas gallery. I used several photos I'd taken at Big Sur and Cozumel (just for the sky) as reference. I used the lighting from some photos and the rocks and water from other photos and used my imagination to figure out how those objects would look in the different light. It was pretty challenging, but it turned out pretty good I think.

At 24" by 36", this is the biggest painting I've ever done. It took 15 scans to get it all scanned into the computer - luckily I recently got a newer, faster scanner and it only took about 45 minutes to do that. I then carefully pieced it together in Photoshop. Unfortunately, the bright areas of the painting were bleached out a bit. I'll have to learn how to override the scanner's "smart" exposure adjustment in the future. (I don't think it's very smart in this case!)

This time I used acrylic instead of oil. The oil paintings just take so long to dry that I thought I should build up an inventory with some acrylic and multi-media paintings before I do more oils.

Paintings for the Salinas Gallery

Last month I signed up with a co-op gallery in old town Salinas through a friend of a friend. It's right by the Steinbeck center, so it gets some pretty decent foot traffic. They liked my work a lot so they're pretty much letting me do anything I want within reason. They particularly liked the "comfy chair" painting, so I decided to do a series of paintings with a similar theme. For the past few weeks I've been tirelessly painting to create something to sell.

This'll be really good for me because it'll really, truly force me to paint a lot more AND it'll teach me to be able to part with my paintings, which has always been hard for me - particularly because I haven't been very prolific. I'm also going to work on the speed of my painting, which may seem like a bit of a trite concern, but I really think I'll benefit greatly from that. From here on I'm going to be very experimental with my paintings. Right now I'm working on some much looser work, making extensive use of the pallette knife, which creates some pretty cool effects once you get comfortable with it.

These 3 paintings are what I've come up with. Let me know what you all think.

Plein Aire Landscape Studies in Oil

I've been so busy with work for the past month and a half that I've barely had time to eat and sleep, much less update my blog. In any case, I finally have time to do it now.

Over the past few months I've been doing some plein aire landscapes in oil. I've wanted to improve my skill with landscapes (and my skill with painting in general) and I think this is an effective way to do that. It forces me to be quick and astute in my observations. It's amazing how quickly the light changes and what a challenge it is to struggle to get something done before the landscape looks completely different from how it looked at the beginning of the painting. Landscapes are also an issue with me because there are so many tiny overlapping elements (thousands of leaves, branches and such) that you absolutely have to become skilled with "suggesting" the detail rather than explicitly rendering it. I've always been stronger with explicit rendering than with suggestion and I think that's kept me from reaching my full potential. I'm not quite where I want to be with these paintings, but I'm hoping to get much better over time with these exercises.