Rain Moving Out to Sea / oils

I waited all week for good clouds and it looked like Fri. would be the best day to go out on the beach to finish this. One rain system was going off the coast with another following behind it. When I got over to First Landing I realized I forgot my terpenoid. That’s one problem of painting in plain air, sometimes I forget something I need. For a minute I tried to decide, should I go back home to get it or is the art supply store closer, I decided to hang around and mix the colors I wanted to use and paint at home. It’s a simple scene so I took an hour or so and mixed my colors as accurately as I could for the clouds and sand, and I also tried to memorize cloud shapes. If I ran home to get my terpenoid the clouds would be all different when I got back. It was clearing up and the clouds directly overhead were like layers of moving white gauze with some fluff coming though and some jet trails breaking up. Freakin beautiful, but the sky overhead is never the same as on the horizon.

I had some fun painting the sky at home with my palette knife. This close up shows some of the texture. After I painted the sand and sky I propped it up against the wall where its been for a year already unfinished, and I liked the sky. From where I was sitting on my sofa the high spots in the paint catch the light in the living room and show sparkles in the sky like sunlight on the clouds. And to think I almost threw the painting away when I realized it wasn’t a good composition to put people in the scene. Now I’m glad I finished it after looking at it for that long undecided.

This close up shows a focal point. White against dark, different textures meeting, lines next to solid areas. I painted the water with brushes and the sand with a palette knife.

I tried to decide, does the painting need the pilings or not. I decided to paint them but I had to wait for the sky to dry. They could be a focal point for the art viewer who likes detail.

Behind Dunes @ Back Bay / oils

I took these pix on my balcony in the shade but the colors are better in the sun, warmer.

Close up of sedge, reflections and water

Every time I go there the water is different so I decided that when I was ready to paint water I’d paint it however it looked that day. When I got there today it was almost calm then a little breeze came up but it only broke the water a little.

Water, sedge and reflections.

You can see grass stuck on the wet paint in these photos. It’ll come off when it’s dry.

Water with reflections, sedge, background trees.

I think the smoother textures of the reflections and water look good next to the heavy textures of the sedge and trees.

This was fun to paint and not too difficult. It used up a lot of paint, though.

Back of the Dunes painting update

The sky, background dunes and trees are finished. The water has one coat of paint on top of the underpainting but still needs another layer. The sedge is still in the underpainting stage. I need to work on the sedge before I finish the water.

It took a while to mix the colors I wanted for the gray and brown dunes. The greens were easier to mix but still took some time. When I get the right color I still take more time to work the paint by adding drops of Terpenoid and mixing it in until the paint is evenly runny. Mixing and working the paint is half the job.

A piece of cut grass is sticking to the wet paint but it will come off when it dries.

The real fun part is blobbing down the paint with my palette knife then smearing and scratching through it with the palette knife.

I’m excited about how this is going. I think it will work out!

The first 3 times I was there getting started on this, it was cloudy but the sun finally came out and really brightened the scene. I like the bleak look of the cloudy days, but the sedge is freakin’ gold with the sun on it. Maybe I can finish the painting this week. Tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy then we get more sunny weather for a couple days before it rains again, if the forecast is right.

Indian Summer at the Tide Pool

I could work on this more but I’m calling it finished. I learned a lot.

The water looks different every time I go there and I’d change it but I’m not sure exactly how to do that so I’m stopping now. Water is a difficult subject for me to represent but the more practice I get the better. Some day I’ll say, “Yes, I nailed it.” The wind, current and sand bar keep changing the direction of it but it has many textures and colors that are hard to match.

A couple people talked to me yesterday and one guy said he paints murals. He was particularly interested in this part of the painting. It probably looks like I painted a lot of skinny lines but it wasn’t that hard to do since I used my palette knife. The trick is to make the paint runny and put down small blobs of paint then scrape through them with the palette knife.

That guy told me to take my art to the local nonprofit and I said no, I checked them out and they are the same as Richmond. They will take my entry fee and not hang my painting. I know already. If all the artists are doing fast easy paintings and asking $100 and I enter a difficult painting that took months and ask $1000 it will be rejected. He told me it’s the same for muralists and his entry fee is $50. And they don’t like his style or something. Also, I don’t want to pay $35 to get my name on the Plein air group email list because I don’t need the group and don’t want to enter the juried shows, so, it was good to talk to someone who knows what a rip off the art world is. I mean, if you know the cards are stacked against you how many times are you going to throw away the money?

The masking fluid worked to help keep my little figures from getting lost in the different textures of paint. I saved them after doing the people in the underpainting stage by covering them with masking fluid then after finishing the water and sand underpainting I peeled off the masking fluid and they needed touch ups but they aren’t too weak. If I tried to paint them on top as the last step they would show the other paint textures underneath.

The figures were a difficult part of it and had me hung up for some time until I could get a plan worked out. And the weather stopped me from working on this because it’s easier to mix the right colors in Plein air than it is to mix colors at home.

The whole painting is done with a palette knife except the figures. I used a brush for them and I think that was a good idea. There are art critics who think a palette knife painting shouldn’t have any brush work and there are critics who are purists that think digital manipulation of a photo is a no no. Some artists think using white paint is cheating in a watercolor. I don’t care about those rules. At the academy they said you should vary your brush strokes to add interest and create focal points. My old teachers who were harsh critics might not complain about me mixing a palette knife and a brush in the same painting or using masking fluid to keep my figures stronger.

Painting with brushes is easier than painting with a palette knife. The palette knife goes out of control more often. See the spooky house? I messed it up and didn’t feel like fixing it. It’s not spooky in real life but I am. hahahah This is why an artist’s life comes out in a painting even if you don’t want it to. If you are an artist who had some weird things happen to you in the past like I did, maybe you get obsessive about that stuff and wish you could “live in the present.” I say, if you’re obsessive about something you should keep trying to work through it. Eventually you can accept it and learn some life lessons from it. If you try to stop your brain from the bad memory you won’t ever get the lessons. The good thing is that sometimes dark stuff shows up in your paintings and you know where it comes from but no one else does but they might notice the dark and it will be interesting to the art viewer. You can use that. Know what I mean?

This is the medium I wanted to try to use. It doesn’t work for painting in the couch like my Maroger medium that I use for oil paint. To paint in the couch is great because you put a layer of medium on the dry painting and paint on top of it. The medium “couches” the paint. Maroger medium makes the surface slick and you have practically no drag on the brush but this stuff dries too fast to work like that. Also, this medium dries a little cloudy and Maroger dries clear.

The masking fluid worked as I planned and my little plastic cups kept the paint wet for weeks! Those were some of the questions I found the answers to through this painting.

Tide Pool painting debriefing / close ups only

When I went out this morning to paint, the sky was pretty with thin wispy white clouds on blue sky and I decided to go over the sky on my painting again to make it more interesting. It was fun mixing up a runny light blue and a runny white, scraping the two colors on top of my underpainting and smearing them a little then blotting some off with paper towels.

I don’t throw away paper towels from my fast food lunches. They’re not very absorbent but I can use them to blot paint or wipe off my palette or palette knife. This whole painting is a palette knife painting but I might use skinny brushes to redo the figures.

One of the jurors in Richmond that liked to reject my paintings from the juried shows told me, “Don’t mix two styles together.” And I was like, wha? I don’t even know what style is what. I guess since this is a palette knife painting I shouldn’t use brushes at all but I’m going to.

After I got my sky to where I can call it finished I knew I really need to go over the whole section of background trees again. We have a week of cloudy rainy weather coming in, if you can believe the forecast.

You can see the sand in the paint. It’s ok. That’s all the proof you need that this is an actual Plein air painting.

I like the clouds without any sharp edges because I don’t see clouds with sharp edges in nature.

I’m calling this tree in the middle ground done, and maybe the grass is done too.

So, I guess if I had to name my style I’d have to call myself a realist most of the time, because I try to match the colors of nature, but they are still not exactly realistic.

Sedge and sand.

If you really want to do realism, copying a photo won’t do the trick. The camera has its own realism and the naked eye has its own realism. Neither one is exactly real no matter how hard you try to represent accurately. Real is something between the naked eye and the camera but not exactly either one as far as I can tell.

Sand, sedge, reflections on water, nearest tree in top left of the photo still unfinished.

I don’t know about you but half the time I can’t tell what’s real in life and what’s fiction, so how can you tell what’s realism in a painting? No matter how real I can make it, my own interpretation of real is how it ends up. I mean, even if I’m trying to copy nature to the best of my ability this is still my interpretation and if you got 100 realists to paint the scene the paintings would all be different. Or maybe the juror who knows styles would say this isn’t realism at all! Who knows. I hope you know what I mean. Everything is each artist’s interpretation no matter how much you try to be realistic your own self, life, experiences or whatever, shows up in the painting.

Tide Pool painting update

I didn’t start on the water yet because I need to plan a few hours to get it going and it would be easier to see with the sand painted first. I’m excited I got this far. This is probably over half finished but I need to go over the whole thing again, not sure about the sky and sand but they might be ok like this. I was planning on putting some marsh grass on the sand in front of the big tree on the left.

Every time I go there the water is different. Today it was calm and reflections were on the water but most of the time when I’m there I don’t see a lot of reflections except on the closer shallow water on the left .

When I started the background a couple weeks ago we didn’t have as much fall color and now more is showing. The first time I painted it I used a light gray green and yesterday I added some shades of orange on top of the green. I want to brighten up the orange a little more and do more on the whole background then when it’s dry, make a thin glaze to go over the whole background and try to give it some aerial perspective. Still a lot more to do on the background but this is ok for a start.

You can hardly see the little boy working on his sand castle but he’s under a layer of sand colored paint with a coat of masking fluid over him. That’s the top of his little round head on the tan tinted canvas paper. When I start on the water I’ll cover his head with light blue and when it dries peel up the masking fluid and it will be like Christmas if it works and my little boy becomes visible. I hope you can see what I’m talking about. I think it will work and I can pull my little figures out. I think it will work.

The grays and brown scribbles over her head are wet sand and it will have bright reflections of water. Then the tan paper will be blue and I’ll be able to take the masking fluid off her too. Sand is sticking to the masking fluid and it’s all over the painting. The more layers of paint you put on top of masking fluid make it harder to peel off and the more time you let it on the paper makes it harder to get off too. Sometimes when you try to peel off the masking fluid the paper rips. We’ll see. Everything’s an experiment and might not work out as hoped. I did a little masking fluid and acrylic experiment before and it wasn’t bad but this is still iffy.

Tide Pool painting update

I’m not even finished with the underpainting but the figures hung me up for a while. I used my sketches and worked at home using my palette knife. I drew the figures again with charcoal on the canvas paper trying to get them a good size for the painting. Then I had to decide on the colors which is much easier if I have a live model. Drawing small is harder than large to me.

I’m going to try masking fluid on acrylic next. I think it will work. If I block out the figure with masking fluid I can paint sand or water color right over top of the figure and when the paint is dry peel off the masking fluid to show the figures as I painted them here. It might be easier than painting the sand or water color right up to the edge of the figure evenly.

Little boy building a sand castle.

I’ll paint over the figures again but it will be the last step.

The boy is sitting on wet sand. That’s what my charcoal shading represents.

You can still see some of my charcoal outline of the figure but that will go away with water colored paint.

If this works my 3 figures will be focal points. I tried adding a small figure into a scene as the last step one time when I was using oil paints a few years ago and didn’t think the figure showed up enough from the background so this time I’m getting the figures under painted first. Sometimes I stop working on a painting and lean it up next to the wall where I can see it and it might take me a long time to decide on how to proceed but I already have a lot of time in this so I would rather take the time to decide and it will have a better chance to work out.

Late Bloomers / acrylic abstract

OK. I’m going to seriously get some work done around here now and stop playing around!

Zombie Receptors in My Brain! / acrylic abstract

I’m not sure what kind of receptors these are. They could be zombie receptors or ET receptors or Bigfoot receptors or anything. All I know is, my brain has receptors.

Just kidding, I don’t believe in brain receptors so I like to make fun of them. Every time I hear on TV about brain receptors for opium or nicotine or murder or something I laugh to myself and say show me the receptors.

This is a mono print with extra palette knife textures added in pink and white.

Witch Flying Past Moon / acrylic abstract

Is this a witch to you or something else?

This is a close up of the mono print above to show that thick texture and colors smearing together. I like to put blobs of three different colors on the palette and scrape the palette knife through them only back and forth a few times on the edge to mix them slightly. Then I scoop some up with the palette knife and blob it onto the paper and press another paper on top of the first one. When you pull them apart you get these nice smears and veins in the paint.

Then it’s fun to decide what it looks like. If I used this small section and decided to cut it out of the bigger print I could enter it in a show as a very small landscape, call it “moon over mountains” but I probably won’t.

I think I’ll do another one. They’re so fast easy and fun!