Tessie and Kloey

Tessie and Kloey
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".
(sold)

It's been a while since I've produced a painting... life got in the way again this past year, and then I had "painter's block" on top of that.
I recently agreed to do a painting of two small poodles, working from a photo taken with a cell phone several years back. (Here I will whine a little: cell phone shot = less than stellar focus and color balance). Tessie is the chocolate poodle with a more reserved personality; Kloey is the more outgoing apricot poodle.

  I began as usual by trying to recreate the photo and pretty quickly abandoned that idea as many of the elements were not reading well as a composition. It's odd how elements can look reasonable in a photo, but look very strange in a painting.
Working with the strong tile grout lines dominating the image was more challenging than I expected as they continuously lead the eye away from the subject and off the edge of the picture. Trying to set them in correctly using a ruler to measure the perspective angles resulted in an odd perspective- it worked much better to just use my eye to determine the placement of the lines.
 At one point I had included the kitchen cabinets lining the background, but they added nothing to the picture other than visual clutter. The vertical cabinets also pulled my eye off the top of the picture and away from the subject. After changing the angles and heights numerous times, I gave up and got rid of  the cabinets, leaving an expanse of tile floor which became disturbing (look at the image with the solid blue rug covered up- yikes!) Including and re-positioning the blue rug stopped the grout lines from shooting off into infinity.
  The tile floor was virtually the same color as the lighter dog.  Adding an overlay wash mix of white, raw sienna and cadmium red, and a touch of ultramarine blue over the light tiles to darken them and push them back helped define the lighter dog.

I'm pleased with the textural contrast of the hard floor behind soft throw rugs and soft dogs. I also like the warm/cool tones repeating throughout the painting. Incorporating the blue colors of the rugs into the dogs helped pull the image together although I am still not satisfied with how I handled the dogs fur textures, and need to find a better solution. The dogs look a little stiff to me, and I did not work out how to make them look more fluid. In retrospect, I should have adjusted more areas of their contours to blend in more with the background values of light and dark to avoid the "cut out" effect.

Red Hen

Red Hen
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".

This is a composite done from shots I took of the Rhode Island Reds next door. I like their boxy bodies, rich colors and dinosaur legs and toes.
Here I tried leaving most of the image in soft focus, except for the head. I like the effect, but feel the legs and toes might have been more interesting with a sharper focus/more detail. I may go back in and try that.

Rooster Jake

Rooster Jake
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 12".
(sold)

Jake belonged to my neighbor until he tangled with a predator one night and met a sad end defending his hens. Nothing left but a trail of feathers.

One goal I had with this painting was to pay more attention to using texture and directional brush strokes. I rearranged some elements I didn't care for from the original photo, like the position of the fence. Still ended up with an awkward group of elements.
I immediately got into trouble with the the background so bright that it competed with the intense colors of the rooster. Graying down the colors in the grass, gravel and fence lines helped make the rooster appear brighter than the surrounding ground.
And once again commenced a long battle trying to articulate grass. Here I experimented with various brushes, and found the older, stiff beat up brushes were good tools to use.

Looking at this now, I think it could benefit from toning down the background even more. I may fiddle with it again later.

Talia & Barnie #3

Portrait of Talia and Barnie.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 12".
(sold)

Much earlier this year I was asked to do one more painting of the girl and the dog.
Shortly after starting this  I managed to tear muscles in my lower back, which was coupled with a severe pinched nerve in my hip. The end result was, I was sidelined from doing much of anything that involved sitting or standing longer than a couple minutes at a time.

Months later, I picked up where I had left off.
From the photo's provided to work from, I chose a an interior shot in a car with the brightly lit background and darker foreground, with reflected light bouncing off the interior surfaces. I liked this shot because the dog was in it, and thought the complex lighting might offer an interesting challenge.

I had to reinvent a lot of the forms around the perimeter that weren't included in the actual shot, and rearrange elements that were just plain unfortunate composition. The dog was in such deep shadow, there was virtually no detail to work with, and took some guesswork.

No matter what I tried, the painting continued to look disjointed. It finally dawned on me that I had ended up with areas of isolated colors, instead of integrating the different colors throughout the surface. Bringing the green of the vegetation outside the window into the foreground instantly helped to pull it together.
I'm a little disappointed with the muddy flesh tones in the face, but was not able to find a good solution. At one point I tried having the face in heavier shadows, and that ended up looking strange.

I came away from this thinking I need to push myself more to mix colors- I still have a tendency to want to use it straight from the tube.
The colors shown in the photo were not particularly engaging and in retrospect, a better approach might have been to keep the background elements more in a grayscale range, with the subject in more saturated color.

Ruby

Ruby

Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".
(sold)

This is Ruby, an older lab with a lot of character and personality. When I started this painting of Ruby, she was in a decline from age related health conditions, and sadly she was gone before I finished her picture. She was loved and will be missed. I hope I did her justice.
She was blind in one eye, which had a different color and reflection. I wanted to include this without it being a major distraction.

I had a very difficult time with the grass and its blooms- everything I tried looked too stiff, too artificial, too stylized, and too contrived. I must have scrubbed off and and wiped out the background at least ten times, starting over by building layers on a new base of Gesso. One thing I am noticing is that when I apply the loose initial layers and textures, it all looks promising. As soon as I start fussing by adding calculated detail, I kill the spontaneity.

The initial mistake was that I was perceiving the grass blooms in the reference photo as being white. I finally went out and collected some grass plumes, and when placed against a white background, they showed as a multitude of  subtle neutral colors.
I  also had better results when I stopped using controlled brush strokes and tried pressing and dabbing the paint on with small variations in the direction.
Using old brushes that were a little stiff with broken and splayed bristles, held at different angles and dabbing gave the good results. I had been reluctant to toss out my collection of old worn out brushes, and now I'm glad I kept them.

 Randomly looking at how other people handled grass has revealed that everyone else has the same problem- it is very difficult to pull off.
I like Andrew Wyeth's technique of  dry brushed tempera layers to delineate grass with textures emulating the look of drypoint or etching on a copper plate.

I am increasingly aware of the lack of linear and textural elements in my work. That would be a good direction to explore.

Talia

Portrait of Talia.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 12".
(sold)

I used to pass the time in long corporate meetings by drawing the faces of people sitting nearby on the margins of my notes, but I hadn't tried a painting portrait before. I'm not used to painting subjects without fur.
This young lady is about 5 years old, with a curious look of maturity. I was told she is very intelligent, self assured and a bit mischievous.

It took some time to get over being intimidated by the idea of painting a human face. Working from a photo, I began with some preliminary black and white drawings to work out the structure in the face, and then looked up some books in the local library on the basics of portrait painting.

One difficulty was that she really does have a mature looking face for her age, especially when "posing" for the camera, so to define her as a child I had to rely on her torso to imply that. Her body was obscured in the photo I worked from, so I had to do some guesswork in handling the torso in child proportions, and not as an adult structure. Adding detailed lace around the collar was my sneaky way of drawing the attention away from the fumbled torso.
Overall, not too bad for a first try. I had a good time exploring how to approach skin tones and learned a lot from reading and experimenting.
As far as the general feel of the painting, I think she comes across a bit too formal, static and mature. I wish I could have better expressed the "child" aspect- this painting might be more a projection of how she may appear in a few years. I'm still baffled on what I would change to achieve this. I also wish I had used a stronger light source on the face to create a little more drama and depth instead of sticking with the diffused light in the photo.

Technical prattle:
Skin color is surprisingly complex. There are shifts of color depending on the hard or soft structure underneath; shifts of value depending on how the light source is hitting the different planes on the face; and colors reflecting on the surface from the environment around it.
Children have very smooth skin, and shadows have to be soft and subtle, with no hard edges or character creases which develop later with age.

I used a suggested skin tone base of white, mixing in small amounts of yellow ochre and cadmium red light to lay in the face. The cadmium red light resulted in too much of an orange cast, and I glazed over that with a mix of Napthol Crimson, a more cool based red which delivered a truer, clear pink tone. The yellow ochre has a cool cast which worked well to reduce the intensity of the red.

For the shadows I added burnt sienna, and/or cobalt blue, to the base tone.
I found the cobalt resulted in a gray cast which didn't give the translucent youthful look I was after, and replaced that with a violet, which warmed up the shadows. Later I tried chromium green in the shadow areas which also worked very well to darken the area, without deadening it.
For the lips, I added a cool red (cadmium red deep) to the base. The lip area was challenging, getting them darker and cooler without looking like applied lipstick. I started way too dark and had to lighten them back up in successive layers until they blended more naturally with the adjacent skin.

Her hair had different colors reflected in it; I built that up using layers of blues, browns and reds, ending with an overlay of  black to let some of the colors show through.
The pink shirt became overwhelming, and I had to tone that down. Although it wasn't in the photo used, I felt compelled to add some lace detail around the collar. I ran this by an 8 year old, who gave me a thumbs up- good choice.
I eliminated detail in the background which distracted too much from the face, and  went with implied texture for some relief from the smooth face.

Note to self for the next time I try skin tones:
- Try an earth tone red (like red oxide) in the base mix instead of cadmium red, which leans towards orange.
A cool red, Napthol Crimson, was a good choice for a clear pink undertone. The cooler Cadmium Red Deep worked well for the lips.
-The Yellow Ochre worked very well to add warmth without going too bright. Naples Yellow worked nicely for adding yellow undertones and reflections. When I tried a Cadmium Yellow in the mix, it was far too saturated and bright.
-For shadows, I would be inclined to try a green to establish the shadow areas. Adding a Chromium Oxide Green to the shadows gave a richer depth and contrast than adding blue, which tended to lean towards a gray cast.

Barnie and Talia

Barnie and Talia.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 14".
(sold)

An attempt at producing a portrait, without being a formal head and torso composition.
It took a while to convince myself that I didn't need to show the face to do a portrait.

I really wanted to include the dog, and this seemed like a good set up. The composition was a little odd but the landscape had some interesting sculptural forms and lines. I liked the strong diagonals going on with the hills, tree lines, and pavement.
I'm getting more comfortable with landscapes and starting to get intuitive on how to build them, but inevitably run into uncertainties at a certain point and start over-fussing, and subsequently loose the spontaneity.
I was a bit lost on handling the grassy open field and tried various textures and splatters of different colors to build some textures without going all fussy with individual lines.
I experimented using a paint named "process yellow", a semi-transparent cool lemon yellow, applied as a wash over the predominantly green grass field and got some interesting results with that.  I never did find just the right tool to get the texture I was after, in spite of resorting to using an old tooth brush, and a stiff parts cleaning brush for tool. This will take more exploring to figure out.
A tough part was the bike wheels- my brain said they were round circles, my eye said they were ellipses. That was a battle.
Another sticking point was the edge where the grass met the pavement- I wanted more detail in the foreground, but the results looked too stiff and calculated and I removed it.

So, I'm really not sure what I think of this. It still feels unresolved to me.
Looking at it now, I wish I had reduced the contrast on the distant trees and hills and have them recede more to create a better illusion of depth, leaving the foreground in higher contrast to emphasize that area more. I do like the cast shadows in the foreground, and wish I had given those more space.