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.

Emma Dog

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

Its been a busy couple months with paperwork and obligatory tasks that left little time or energy to work on any paintings. I have a couple in progress but not resolved yet.
I started this painting about four years ago, set it aside, and never got back to it until this month when it surfaced again. Emma is a very elegant King Charles Caviler Spaniel who joined her owner and myself one summer day on a picnic in a park. I liked the contrast of the green background with the warm red and blonde tones in her coat. A lot of subtle color reflections were bouncing off the white areas of her coat as well. She sat quietly and observed all the activity going on around her with keen interest. This dog is prettier than most people I know.

I had the usual problems trying to photograph this with reflections bouncing off the layer of sap green. That particular green is very reflective after it dries.

Barnie

Barnie on a dirt road.
Acrylic on canvas. 12" x 16".

I was asked if I did paintings of dogs, and having never tried, I didn't know the answer. So I gave it a try.
Barnie appears to be a poodle.

The photo I worked from had good contrast but limited in detail and color. Except for the tongue.
I really liked that tongue.
Initially the tongue was a very intense pink and dominating the painting, but I was advised to tone it down so I worked a thin layer of black over the pink to drop the intensity, which worked out well.
(There was also a thin string of drool hanging from the mouth, but I decided it would be best remove that.)

At one point the dog's color morphed into a rich chocolate tone, but that wasn't accurate for the dog's actual coloring, and I worked over the surface to lean it back towards black.

The colors used were burnt sienna and burnt umber, a red oxide, yellow iron oxide, cerulean blue, and for the first time, black. I've had the the tubes of oxides around for a long time, but rarely used them. They behave a little differently from other colors in the intensity and opacity.


I'm pleased with the texture in this painting, and discovered possibilities for using black paint. I have always avoided black because I found it to be too "flat". Layering a black wash over other colors can yield some interesting and effective results.

Raging River Bridge No.1008E, version 4

Raging River Bridge No. 1008E, version 4.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".
(sold)

I thought this was not finished, but I needed to hand it over to fill a space on a wall for a while and hoped to return to it later and make some adjustments.That never happened.

A winter view of the bridge, standing upstream on the southeast bank, with the bridge framed by moss covered maples and a western red cedar. The river is running fast and full, with most of the interesting rocks submerged.
I was interested in working with the different textures, and getting more practice on trees. The trees are still not coming across to me. They all feel stiff, awkward and a little cartoonish, so its clear I am still not interpreting the forms correctly.

When I cover the stand of maples on the left, I like the painting better. The perspective and sense of depth improves. The problem may be that the mossy maples are the same color and intensity as the trees further back, which flattens the visual plane.
So either the distant trees need to be adjusted by toning down the contrast and intensity, or the maples in front need to be changed. Maybe shifting to a more blue-based green relating to the sword ferns would pull them forward more.

Cat 60

Cat 60; itchy cat on the bed.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".

This is Lizzy scratching an itch on her chin.

On this painting I set two parameters:
1). Use only the three primary colors (yellow, red and blue),  plus white and black; and
2). Use only a large brush to paint with.

The purpose of this was to force myself to expand color mixing, and think more about using brush strokes advantageously.

   Looking over the paintings I have produced over the past couple years, a couple things are beginning to stand out. I concluded I'm over-using color straight from the tube and under-utilizing mixed colors.
The works I feel are most successful are ones where I used a more limited palette.

   Using only the three colors really stumped me in places, as I have become very reliant on grabbing the nearest tube of relevant color and adjusting that as needed. Theoretically I should be able to produce any color needed using the primaries, but I was surprised at how clumsy I was at color mixing. I had to purchase a tube of black, as I never use it. As it turned out, I only used it once to mix with yellow to produce a green.
I found the mixed greens disappointing, and could not produce a decent brown- just a dull, muddy brown. I ended up layering several colors to emulate a brown tone.

  Far more difficult was to use only a large brush. I had to go out and purchase a large brush, as everything I had on hand was pretty small if not outright tiny. My old large hog bristle brushes are so worn down that they are no longer useable to apply paint. They work pretty well as scrubbers, though.
Trying to work with this giant brush was comical. I had a very difficult time with areas where I would normally be using a #0 size. In the end I had to cheat and use a smaller #2 bright for the tight detail areas, and still being a far larger size than what I'd normally use, felt very clumsy. I couldn't figure out how to hold the brush at first, but got the hang of it after a while.