Another setup that I let David prepare for us to paint. For a young guy he has a great eye. I keep reminding him to consider his main design element and in this case I think his worked better then mine. I need to listen to my own advice. This time I got to take home the fresh veggies also.
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I had another sitting with Andre today and will finish this very soon as I have gotten pretty close to being completed. His locks have been very interesting to do and I left them to last since every time he moves about they change positions greatly. I'll complete them now from the photo as I have all the hues and values well established.
André has been a great subject to paint and a delight. I'm not finished and will work further on his dreadlocks which are an amazing feature, he tells me they have been ten years in the making. I've been meaning to paint this dog and went ahead and did this drawing first. Drawing the portraits first I have found to be a great help with developing them into paintings. Why not with a dog portrait with the same process. I've also discovered with this that I really enjoy doing these sketches, so much fun. Having been drawing for weeks now in my sketch book as a preliminary step to the portraits, I've decided I like doing graphite so much that I wanted to do something a little different on my day off. Might have to take another day off this weekend and do something else not art related. This was the orchid I purchased a week ago and I've been trying to find time to paint it again but this did not happened yet. Here I was trying to look at edges and try and get depth to the drawing. Fun stuff! Second week at my local Farmers Marketpainting outdoors. This was painted en plein air under the cover of the bandstand because it started to sprinkle when we first got started so taking no chances we got up on the stage where there was cover. This piece is going into my Daily Paintworks auction starting at $50us. I haven't been very active there lately but will start this going again with sale prices for the duration of the auctions only. These after auctions will go up to my standard $280. My local farmer's market has started it's new season. As I am officially still in the last couple of weeks of my portrait residency I figured I'd add the head with the the planes to my still life set up. The market is just outside of where I am located for painting and this week I went out into the market to see more of my neighbours. It was a very busy market and I got a lot of interest. This is a screen shot from the video I tried to take that didn't turn out for me. I need a lot more practice before I show any of them. At the end of the market hours the sun came out for a short while, lovely. You can see some of my portraits on display, plus the still life set up. I purchased an orchid that wasn't going to fit my panel very well, a bit too high but beautiful with lots of buds. I shortened the stem and brought it into the oval design element I chose to work with. I didn't need to move mountains in this plein air painting. I picked up my painting at Opus Langley this weekend and took photos of the piece. After not seeing it for a week I can be a little more objective towards it. I had an interesting response to it as my memory of it was that it was more lively and brighter then I found it. I did however get back to liking it after editing the photo to post here and making sure the photo matched the painting. The day had been grey and I painted it to maintain a subtly of colour and develop the warm and cool aspects to work off each other. This had been my main objective of the painting so when I remembered it as being much brighter this may have been the trick of painting it outdoors then bringing it inside, the paintings never look quite as bright. In this case I didn't try to push the saturation of the hues but tried to capture them and values as I saw them and played with the alternating warm and tool tones. I had thought it wouldn't jump out after I brought it inside and I also didn't think it had a chance of winning anything. The staff had said that there had been a lot of positive feedback so this makes me feel pretty good and I'm still very thrilled to have won. Yesterday, Michael King and I went back to Langley to paint a spot that was outside the boundaries of the Opus challenge we were both on the weekend before. I had found this very cool spot and wanted to go back. The buildings looked to me from another time. Historical corners like this are getting harder to find. I'm not used to painting buildings and the straight lines and perspective kept challenging me. I may have also lost my focus on what I most liked about this spot as I struggled to capture everything as it appeared instead of the shapes, I was painting buildings. I did think though that my drawing skills are getting a little better after working daily on portraits. Thank you Michael for taking me back there. Opus Outdoor Painting Challenge 2014, my third year doing this challenge and 3rd time lucky. I'm very thrilled to have won 1st price in the Langley area challenge.
The day started with some drizzle and I moved back under a tree which changed my original approach to this scene. I wanted to do a portrait of the tree but give the water a lot of interest. Instead the tree and it's subtle mossy colours became my focus. I didn't get a final photo of my painting and it will be at Opus Langley on display for a week. The photos here show the painting about 3/4s done. I was pretty pleased with my piece and felt I had captured this lovely old tree. |
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