58. Headed Back Down

oil/panel 11x14

I am really tired today, and I finally just pooped out trying to finish this, so I'm calling it done.

There is a lot going in here with light effect, and it required lots of concentration.  My brain is full, can I stop now?

56. Portrait from life, but I forgot to bring my paints....

Well, trying to get back into painting since the surgery.  We had to go to town and there was a free portrait session at the art center,  so I popped in.. had everything ready... except I forgot to bring my paints!  How silly is that?   and it wasn't even brain surgery!
Well, I dug around in my stuff and found one tube of burnt sienna. It's a color I do not use anymore - instead I use Rembrandt's Transparent Red Oxide, which is a much richer, darker, and transparent color perfect for creating lovely darks.   So I squeezed some of that out, and then one of the other painters was kind enough to give me a dab of white.   I don't know what kind of white it was... but it seemed to have no mixing strength at all.  Actually, I felt like I was fighting  with my materials the whole time.  I painted on a paper canvas, which is what I usually use for these studies, not wanting to commit to a more expensive support.. but it just seemed like the paint was soaking right in and it took multiple layers to just get the canvas covered.. Well anyway,
here's what I got for my efforts.. nothing to write home about, but always good practice working from life.
The lovely Chinese gal who posed for us was very sweet.  I never did quite understand her name, as the other gal who organized the session is Korean and speaks only broken English herself.

55. The Pack Trip, last post for awhile.....

8x10 oil/panel

This one came along rather easily.. not sure why that happens when it happens..  I did not draw this at all other than to scrub in some shapes with a thin wash of transparent paint, and just started placing color, paying close attention to values.  For this one, I used much thicker paint and more  palette knife work for the background, and left that distant row of trees only suggested.  Part of me sure wants to go back and put in more detail, but I'm refraining...

This composition is what is known as a steelyard - or balance - format. The main players of the horse, rider and pack mule front and center, even though larger, are still balanced by the smaller,  distant  rider, by placement, and also by the fact that the distant rider is contrasted against the lighter background.

This will be the last post for awhile... A precious new grandbaby was born a month early, and he's in the NICU, and will be for about a month, they say. I'm flying out to help my daughter, so won't be able to paint while there...  Stay tuned, I'll be back!!

54. The Red Feeder

The Red Feeder 8x10 oil/panel

My artist friend, Don Gray http://www.dailyartwest.com/ - whose work I admire greatly, recently did a winter scene - he does them so well, that I was inspired to try one myself.  His is better.  But it was fun playing around with the colors of snow and sky on a gray day. And then the one spot of color with the red metal feeder.

We don't get many gray winter days here in New Mexico - when it snows, sure - but so often once the storm has passed, the sun comes out and the sky is clear.   It was sort of nice having the subdued colors and values, no shadows - just the shapes with very slight indication of form here and there..

oh, and here's an update on a previously posted painting. I decided to re-work the background a bit...

53.Mooo

8x10 oil/panel

I did sort of an experiment today. I started this painting and timed myself for 30 min. I wanted to see how much I could get done in that amount of time, and would continuing on improve it greatly.

  At 30 min. I probably could have stopped and had almost as good an effort as what the finish was.  It was just the finessing of edges, and a bit of the background stuff that wasn't done much.   I wish I had taken a photo at that stage, but was just having too much fun painting, so kept on going after taking quick stock of where I was.  

One reason 30 min. was enough time is partly due to the simplicity of the shapes in this painting... and partly due to the way I usually approach something like this.. That is to block in major shapes, put down an average color for shadow, and an average color for light.  Doing that gets the canvas covered, and from there it's just adjusting little colors and values along the way.

Well, it was an interesting little experiment. The funnest (is that a word?) part was getting the fur... soft fur and more chunky fur... all about edges on that...

52. Cow Pony II

8x10 oil/panel

Another purty horse today... Playing around with some warm/cool lighting options. For some reason, I just can't get a good photo of this today, sorry about the glare...

One of the things I always do is to photograph a painting and put it into grayscale, so I can judge whether the overall values are working.. is there enough light/dark contrast?  Does one value dominate, or are lights and darks too equally distributed?  Those are some of the questions I ask myself.  Here's this one in grayscale.

It is sometimes hard to judge colors for their value (Lightness or darkness).  Warm colors we tend to judge as lighter than they are, and cool colors as darker.  don't know me why, I just know it's true.  With this grayscale you can see that the very lightest thing in the painting is the white "sock" of the horse's front leg.  I would have guessed that the cowboy's hat was equally as light, but as you can see, it isn't!

So, I will probably let this set up a bit and do two things..

lighten the cowboy hat and lighten the sky. I knew that had to be done, but was waiting for it to get a little "tacky" before trying to touch that up.

51. Cow Pony

8x10 oil/linen

Just a nice looking cow pony for today.  Nice to be back working on some small dailies after finishing up one big deadline!