an arting life
One of the best things about being an artist is the beauty I see everywhere I look. When I was cleaning one of my palettes this past week, the running colors were so gorgeous, I had to capture them with a photo. (Note: I paint with water-soluble oil paints, so I can clean them in…
This is an example of what happens when I look at one of my earlier sketches and all I feel is, “Well, it’s okay…” I started with the oil sketch from January 8th, the Orange Hills at Sunset painting. Frankly, I was going to put it into eBay at a low starting price, just to…
Around dusk yesterday, our area lost all electric power. The silence was wonderful — no humming appliances — and no streetlights to influence the colors of the landscape. As the skies darkened, I decided to sit near a window and paint. The difficulty when painting in low-light conditions is that… well, in the darkness, I…
I’m still deciding how to represent the effects of snow on the landscapes outside my window. These are two sketches from the snowstorm on Saturday evening. I’m not sure if either of them is a completed work… yet. The first is a piece that I thought I’d completed, but the more I look at it,…
This is my 18″ x 24″ oil painting, Flurries Variation (13 Jan 2011). It’s sort of a landscape, but also an abstract. To be honest, it’s a bit of an enigma for me. Here’s the story: After I’d sketched-in the larger flurry painting – which turned out as a very high-key painting – I wanted…
This was one of my free, one-day downloads. For 24 hours (17 – 18 Jan 2011), people could download a printable copy of my b&w fine art drawing, Pandorica #4. It would print on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of white paper at 150 pixels/inch. This was the first of my one-day downloads. From time…
This morning’s skies looked ominous at first, and the colors were there for just a couple of minutes. I was glad that I’d already set out my palette with the colors I was likely to need. This was a small, fast oil sketch on an 8″ x 10″ canvasboard. Many sunrises feature the brightest colors…
It was another sunrise with quickly-changing skies. I had to work very quickly to capture the colors on these two 8″ x 10″ canvasboards. The first one includes darker colors and higher contrast. (In real life, the reds aren’t that vivid, blue-ish, or light.) The sun was just coming up (in back of me) and…
With some minor changes, the larger Flurries at Dusk painting is now completed. (See the nearly completed version plus backstory, here. Mostly, I added contrast in some areas, and softened the white areas in the sky.) It’s a higher key than I’d expected, but I’m pleased with the lyrical quality of the color. The completed…
This weekend, I completed the fifth of my Pandorica-inspired drawings. This is the first of the bigger drawings. The circle is about 10 1/2″ across, and it’s drawn on a 14″ x 17″ sheet of paper. The design was drawn, one block at a time, using a zero-point Koh-i-Noor drawing pen and black India ink….
I’m beginning to work on larger paintings, based on some of my recent color studies and oil sketches. The photo (above) shows the first stage of this painting. I’m happy with at least half of it, so the finished work won’t look tremendously different… or at least I don’t think it will. (Sometimes a painting…
This is the second of two paintings of this morning’s sunrise. Within minutes of completing the early sunrise painting, shades of pink seemed to dominate the sky. Continuing the theme of “urgency” from my previous work, I deliberately chose a larger canvas. This painting is on an 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas. My thought was:…