A day spent in the sky.

Long day yesterday - about 10 hours at the easel. I had to keep going while the paint was wet but I did manage to fit in a swimming lesson with Danielle (4.5yrs) at 3pm, which kept me going. Am letting that dry today and working on other stuff - gives me a break from the fumes too. I use Chroma Archival Oils (with odourless solvent) which is supposed to be low toxicity, but I think my body has developed a dislike for it over the past 5 years. I was even thinking of changing to watercolours last night - I've seen you can buy watercolour canvas on stretchers now from Frederix which looks pretty cool. Don't want to throw away all that I've learned about oil paint application though - and then there's the saleability of oils which is nice (but then there are a few artists like Alvaro Castagnet who seem to do okay with watercolour). Maybe I'll switch oils to see if that makes a difference - or move my easel outdoors. That seems a bit more practical.

About the painting: The trickiest part about this was adding in the dashes of complementary colours once the initial paint layer was down. Mixing it too - pretty tricky to match very light values like that - and that's the key to getting those dashes of complementaries to shimmer - getting exactly the same value as that paint it's going on top of. Lovely effect when you get it right though - well worth the effort. (Note: a colour's complementary colour lies opposite it on the colourwheel eg. Blue's compliment is orange.)

Had a look at Thomas Kinkade's plein air painting Capitola Village while I was doing this. Well he says it's plein air, but that's an awful lot of detail for an outdoor painting - I figure he finished it in the studio. Prefer his outdoor work to his other more popular stuff - much fresher - and a good outdoor painting always impresses me because they're just so hard to pull off.

The Design in Photoshop.

The underpainting in acrylic - 24x60" canvas.



The sky palette.



oil painting lessons | free painting lesson | free oil painting lesson | oil painting lesson video
how to oil paint | free oil painting lesson video | oil painting lesson dvd | oil painting dvd

Views: 258

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of The Complete Artist to add comments!

Join The Complete Artist

Comment by debbie piro on April 12, 2012 at 23:24

keep us updated on this one please.

Comment by Gregory Becker on December 6, 2008 at 22:40
I enjoy seeing the pallet. It's like a collection of color pulled straight from the sky. It makes me wonder if it would be benificial to me to organize my colors closer to the image I'm going after.

About

The Complete Artist is a friendly social network for all artists wanting to improve their painting.

Get my FREE Painting Lessons here!

Groups

Photos

  • Add Photos
  • View All

Events

© 2024   Created by Richard Robinson.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service