Windmills at Kinderdijk, the Netherlands

Windmills at Kinderdijk / 6x9 / Oil on Panel

Yesterday I tried to channel my inner Ken Auster and paint the New York Taxi challenge for Different Strokes from Different Folks. Today I was "working" on Mike Workman and trying to create more of a tonal landscape. Even though the sky is overcast, I wanted a feeling of warmth and light coming up through that grass, so this one has a yellow ochre underpainting.

When I started this blog I was getting a little tired of painting traditional still life, and so my original purpose was to give myself a chance to experiment with different subjects and styles of painting in order to choose the one I liked best. So far what I've found is that I like them all, but for right now I've decided to focus more on landscape/cityscape paintings.

For the past two years I've been doing a lot of plein air painting, and although I think that's the hardest kind of painting there is--think bugs, quick moving light, wind, people looking over your shoulder, etc.--I also think that's the best way to learn. You're painting from life and you have to move quick. No slow-pokes in that arena! You're constantly trying to judge values and mix color, pick it up on your brush and plop it in the correct place. Not an easy feat, and when I went out last week I actually had someone standing behind me snapping photos while I painted. At first it really bothered me, but then I decided that it was forcing me to focus only on the painting. Yet another learning experience...

So my current goal is to continue to paint looser and work on landscape/cityscape paintings that convey a sense of place and (hopefully) a definite mood or emotion. Stay tuned, though, because I'm also taking a bunch of figurative workshops in the next few months.

Finally, I truly appreciate all your positive and kind comments about my art work. You are all so talented that it means a lot to me that you even look at my work, let alone take the time to comment. But if there's something you notice that you think could be better, please don't hesitate to make a suggestion or two for improvement. I'm all ears, and I'm here to learn.

Grisaille Experiment, Stage Two

This is the original photo I used for yesterday's grisaille. It was a gray day, and I took this shot through the tinted window of a small tourist boat. Consequently, there was no hope for accurate color, but I really liked this composition so I had to try it.

One of the reasons I decided to do a grisaille was so I could play around with the color without the commitment of an alla prima approach. I wanted to warm up the scene a bit, and if the colors I glazed in looked "wrong" I could easily wipe them off and try again. I'd like to eventually do a larger painting of this, and if I can come up with a more colorful version I am happy with I can use that as my model.

Using mostly transparent colors and lots of Liquin, here's where I ended the first stage of glazing:

I can see that there are areas that need to be cleaned up in the sky, and the reflection of the tree trunk in the water is a bit off. This will take opaque paint to fix, but since this is a study for a larger painting I'm not too worried about it. I don't want the colors to get too bright because that's not typical of this place, but I do think I'll try another day of glazing before I add a few final opaque touches.

Any suggestions?

Another Experiment--Grisaille

Kinderdijk Windmill / 6x8 / Oil on Cradled Panel / 1st stage

About ten days ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a toothache--a former root canal had decided to go to the dark side. The strongest pain killer in the house was Extra Strength Excedrin, and only after popping a couple did I remember it's full of caffeine. The bad news (there was no good news) was that it didn't cut the pain and now I was seriously awake. What to do? Well, I don't know about you, but when I paint I forget about everything else, so I grabbed a panel and started to go through old photos to find a suitable 2 AM subject--hoping I would forget about the tooth.

I chose a photo from a cruise my husband and I had taken on the Rhine and Mosel Rivers. One of our stops was Kinderdijk in the Netherlands. After doing my usual cropping routine with Photoshop, I came up with a composition that I liked and thought would work.

By this time it was 3 AM. I decided to take the easy way out and do a value study with one color--a grisaille. A grisaille is usually done in grays and in a little higher key than how you want the final painting to look. When the first layer is dry, the artist, using transparent paints and a some type of medium, glazes color onto the painting. These glazes are then built up in successive layers to achieve the desired color. This layering process took the Old Masters quite a while to accomplish due to the drying time involved between layers, and if you've seen paintings done with this technique you know what a beautiful and unique glow they have. We, however, have the magic over-night drying potion known as Liquin. I'll post this again when I get to the glazing process.

By the way, as long as I was painting I forgot about the toothache. Art cures many ills.