A Painting A Day

This is my new dog, Rufus. I sketched this quickly last night. Not my best work, but I'm rusty and so had to shake the cobwebs out from between my fingers.

I have always loved this photo, so I thought it would make a great painting. It was taken our first summer at the lake house.  Daddy had passed away in August of 2005 (I think that's right), and then we bought the lakehouse in December. Daddy had built two little boats like this.  We got one and I think John got the other.  He even made the oars! So we take it out on the water and it floats!  I snapped this picture of Ian from the dock.

A few technical details. I did this in oil on a 14x16 stretched canvas. Also I had primed this with a really warm orange, so the orange shows through in a lot of places. I was very pleased with the effect, and I think I'll prime some more the same color.  I love working with oil. It's just so nice to mix the colors right on the canvas.  I did that with everything. And again, I did not stay true to the actual colors in the picture. I made it a bit more colorful.

I worked with pretty large brushes for most of it... mostly a number 4 filbert and a number 4 round. It was very hard to do the detail in the face. I tried to switch to smaller brushes, but couldn't really control them on the canvas.  I read up on how to do fine control online and it looks like I need to get a mahl stick. It's just a stick with a padded end that you place on the canvas to steady your hand. I'll have to try that!

I'm not really sure if this is finished. I think that's the thing that's the hardest for me... determined when to stop.  I do think I need to fix his shirt (it looks like there's a lump of something in the front), and I need to fix the colors on his left arm, the oar on the right is not even painted,  I need to put more detail in the wood of the boat and I need to work on the shadows under the boat a bit. So maybe I'll work on it a little more tomorrow. If not, maybe it is finished! LOL

Things have been really hectic lately, and I was about to explode from stress yesterday... so I picked up a canvas and just whipped this up. I painted in a frenzy! Not even thinking about what I was doing.  This is the result. I had an old violin in the closet that I pulled out.  I wasn't interested in the details, I was more interested in creating the illusion of woodgrain, and I wanted to make deep haunting shadows.

The funny thing is, I was proud to get something accomplished so I showed it to my husband and he said, "That will be really nice when you finish it." Duh! I thought it WAS finished! LOL

I think this was a little too ambitious of me. Tonight I tried to paint the dog. We have an Irish Setter named Rexx.



I never did get the mouth completely right. The funny thing is, I think the body of the dog is the best part, and I only spent like 5 minutes on that. I agonized over the face and the hand and they still don't look right.

I don't know if other people use as manycolors as I do. The dog was so many colors! It was also my first time to portray denim (in the jeans) and while I think the color is "okay", I have lots of room for improvement!

Well, I keep falling further and further behind. I guess I'm going to have to settle for doing a painting every day I can until I hit 30 paintings. Tonight's subject was an old pickup I saw rotting in a yard.





I am semi happy with it. I used palette knifes for the leaves. The colors in the truck were very hard to match - especially working from a picture and working at night. I did this on a 6x8 canvas board. I ordered a whole bunch of them from dickblick.com for really cheap. They were something like .57 cents a canvas. I also got some more oils from the website and they were really reasonable. I can't wait to try them out. I got cobalt blue, permanent blue and naples yellow!

The green I mixed for the truck tonight was (surprise) viridian. It's more of an emerald green, but by mixing I was able to achieve kind of an army green on the truck and I used the same base color to mix the grass.

Where is the front of the truck you might ask? Well that's a good question! It was gone, so I didn't even try to paint it in. I love the way the truck is kind of being reclaimed by nature.

There are two pictures because I realized after looking at the truck last night that I forgot to paint in the mirror, so I did that this morning and tried to take a better picture of it.

I felt like I was on a roll, so I decided to make up some lost ground. I think I'm three paintings behind at this point. I'm not too worried about it. I'm doing the best I can, and am not going to stop until I get 30 paintings. I am not happy at all with this one:



I don't think I spent enough time on the drawing, so my crab is a funny shape!  The body looks too big and the claws aren't big enough! I also couldn't get the colors right. I think I will have to attempt this again in daylight.

I took this picture on the way to the lake house. The clouds were just beautiful and I thought this would be nice to paint. So tonight I tried to capture it.



This was almost too easy to paint. I used the cerulean blue in my palette on the sky. It was the perfect color for a bright blue sunny sky. I never even used my palette knife to mix colors because I mixed them right on the canvas board. I painted blue straight from the tube on the sides and then gradually added white and a little gray. Then I painted in the clouds on top of the sky. I added just a touch of ultramarine blue in the furthest clouds to give them distance.

The grassy field was super easy. I started with the dark green treeline and then lightly used that same color (a little verdian, ultramarine and lemon yellow) to give the field it's depth. Then I used straight cadmium yellow over the field... and to give it a rich wheat tone, I used a light reddest mixture of alizarin crimson and white with a touch of yellow ochre and brushed that over the tops of the grass. I added a few drops of white for the illusion of flowers... and then to be whimsical I reflected the grass off the clouds! So you see just a touch of the green grass at the base of the clouds closest to you.

I almost felt like signing this one!