The one not choosen

A customer in the gallery a couple of weeks ago was interested in a re-creation of a painting that I did several years ago, but wanted it to be a palette knife painting. When I sent them a photo of the finished painting they were "No longer interested". Oh well I have a rustic 16 x 20" barn wood frame it will look good in.

Here is a better photo of yesterday's painting. This one is shot straight on and has no glare. The only thing I am going to do to it is to give it a few more shades of red in the flowers at the base of the palms.

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8" x 10 inches in a gold plein air frame (or black) $265.00

Sunday painter

I have been doing a lot of reading about oil painting and looking at many oil painting photo demonstrations and somewhere in my reading there was a suggestion to do your own demonstration to make yourself aware of where your problems begin. Since many of my paintings start our fine and end up a mess I decided that this was a good idea. Here's my demo. Using a photo and a canvas that had a middle value ground I start out by painting in the negative shapes. (The area around the palms and shadows).

I lay in the dark values in the palms and the grass.

I decide to take out the palm fronds on the left hand side, so I scraped them out, add some more paint to the sky and lay in the shadow and the lower palm fronds and the palm trunks.

I darken the shadows and added some paint to the ocean.

I start to add color and value changes to the palm fronds and I scrape away the right hand palm because I realize I need to adjust the color (make it blue-er) to establish distance. I start to lay in the ground shrubs at the base of the palms.

I decide the palms don't look right so I scrape parts of them away and add more sky.

And here I make the exact mistake again, to many fronds and the distant palm on the right is too heavy and too green.

Here I get more air back into the upper palms, get the distant palm to be okay, but not great and then I screw up the shadow.

By this time I am sick of blue and green, so I throw in some red, and some color variation to the sand, which doesn't show up here and start to rework the shadow and give the ocean a little wave action.

I have added a lot more paint to the sky and reworked the shadow shape. And that's as far as I got. I'll look at it tomorrow and see what to do next. And I think working it like a demo helped. By the way the photo was from wetcanvas.com, they have copy right free photos on their site.

Recent firing

This recent firing included some serving pieces with twin palms on them, some spoon rests and some Christmas ornaments. If I do a few ornaments during the summer months it might not seem so overwhelming when the season hits.

Here's and order of flip flops that I did for Two Friends in Lewes, Delaware. If you are in the area check out the store.

Back to fundamentals

Mangrove study, "Before the rain"
Mangrove study, "After the rain"




Mangrove study, Mangroves on a windy day"

Mangrove study, "Mangrove with distant sailboat"

This mangrove clump is not far from my house and I have painted it many times over the last 8 years. I feel my academic painting skills need reinforcement. Using oil paint I am going keep painting this scene stressing the fundamentals of the painting process. I am using a limited palette of colors and concentrating on light, value and composition. All of the above studies were done on location, en pein air,and they are all are 8" x 10". I'll try not to bore you with too many of them.