Friday, July 30, 2010

Along the Dochart


I don't think this is finished but it's time for input from others. The photo was taken in Killin, Scotland, when we were there a few years ago. The painting has an underpainting of watercolor with pastel over that.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Big Green Wave





This pastel is from a photo that one of my watercolor students wants to paint. I'm not terribly experienced in painting waves and water, so I said we could each paint the painting together and learn together. So she emailed me her photo. I worked with the photo for a long time to get the wave in the water luminescent then spent yesterday painting it in pastels. I know, pastels go from dark to light and make this much easier to paint than the light to dark of watercolor. Maybe I started with pastels because I was too lazy to put them away and get out my watercolors. I plan to work on a series of small watercolors of this photo over the weekend in hopes of learning enough to be able to teach rather than experiment so much in class.
I started this painting with an underpainting which I managed to photograph this time, along with a couple of in-process steps. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the focus on my camera had been switched to manual, so most of these are badly out of focus. Maybe you can get the idea of the earlier steps.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Finished???


Do you think I'm finished? If not, why not?

Friday, July 16, 2010

Light on the Path




This is from another photo I took at Cheryl's house in Maryland. When I was browsing my photos for a reference, this one jumped out at me because of the light. The three photos here are at different points in the process of painting from the general to the specific. What I didn't think to photo was the underpainting in purple. This time when I did the underpainting I tried to make it true to the values of the final painting, loosely, of course. I think I want to make the "sky holes" where the sky shows through the trees either white or a blue that looks white. Right now as I see the painting on my easel all the light is in the ground. Perhaps I want some dappled shadows in the ground, too. I'm always up for suggestions and critiques! Just in case it's hard to tell, the larger image here is the most recent and they're all the same size if you click for a larger version.

Great Blue


This heron appeared while I was kayaking on our friend Cheryl's lake. I did an all-over underpainting in magenta.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Sunrise


This is another, pastel over watercolor. The lake is mostly the watercolor as are the non-blue part of the sky and the far shore. Under the foreground I had red watercolor. It was pretty ugly as just a watercolor but got a whole lot better when I got the greens over the foreground. I guess I'm finished, unless someone sees something glaring about it.