Artist Studio
I have found that doing quick 45 minute plein aire demonstrations in oil is too difficult and not as focused as I like my lessons to be. Enjoy the paintings and come and paint with me next September in Rockland Maine.
The secret here is to keep the edges in the distance soft by floating the shapes on top of one another when the paper is still wet and working cooler in the distance to warmer in the foreground. I let the lake accept the washes from the distant trees to indicate the reflections.
Today the rain forced us indoors to paint in a lovely little art room reserved for kids after school art programs. So not only do we get to paint our own work we get to look at all of the creative pieces by the artistic minds of local school children. I worked from images today
I had some image problems and wasn’t happy with my blog’s appearance, the camera shot too light too dark bad color oh wait that was me pushing the button. Anyway here are the images and I will clean them up tonight. These 4 I painted the last two days, I also did some oils but
Continue Reading “Here are some images of the last few days”
I worked on creating a scene from very generic buildings and foliage. I rearranged the buildings and exagerated the sky to create movement towards the center of interest the buildings and added some figures for a little bit of humanity. I think it worked out okay but I was hoping for a little more detail and representational content but I ended up here. It is hard in 45 minutes to teach a lesson and paint a painting that has lots of finish and detail.
Again I had to demonstrate watercolors in damp overcast conditions. I just wanted to have more contrast for the lesson so I amped up the light and created a large shape of trees and painted this shape on top of a light background. I wanted to have very interesting white shapes to work against. When
Continue Reading “One more day of inventing the subject from the basics”
Yesterday in Camden the weather was again overcast and windy. For my demonstration I wanted to paint a more sunny day and to be able to acentuate the early fall colors. I designed my painting on the foundation of solid white shapes and limited my shapes to about 4 major shapes.
Today we were at Camden Harbor and it was supposed to be rainy but in fact it was just damp and very foggy but for my demonstrations I caught moments when the fog was lifting. I have found when it is damp struggling with wet paper is an issue so I don’t wet the paper
Continue Reading “In the studio: Another foggy day in Maine”
It was a lovely sublime day with lots of surf and the rolling bands of thick to moderate fog. It is always a challenge to paint in these conditions because the value range is so close and it is very hard to stay within these values. Plus the colors are very muted and cool and it is easy to try and amp things up to get more contrast and more drama and that is not fog.
I was painting at Merry Springs a lovely park in Camden Maine today and painted these three watercolors. I tried to keep the focus really simple but tried to capture the early fall colors and dramatic light in the trees. Again I massed my shapes together to get a solid composition and then put my focus where the best light shapes were contrasted with the strongest darks. Think about where you want the viewer to look and then make that your goal in the painting.
I tried to have a well concieved center of interest and I started with a good idea of where and how I was going to use white paper to really give a crisp feeling of light. Remember a good starting thought is white is light in watercolor. I know there are tints and other solutions but it is a good starting point. Here are my 6 paintings all of them are painted on 200 lb cold press Waterford paper.