Saturday, January 29, 2011

Second update of the day

Well, I've been spending too much time painting the tanker, which is not the main subject. I'm finally almost done with it. I'll intend to finish, or almost finish, this piece tomorrow. Fortunately I finished my homework for a class for my day job yesterday and readings are not so difficult I can spend time for painting as much as I want tomorrow.

Otherwise, I can't start the new landscape painting, which I already stretched&gessoed the canvas two weeks ago.

Building up context

Started filling up the background with colors closer to the final ones, at the same time layering colors on the main subjects, at this moment the brown cow in the center. Those would pretty much decide the color contrast as well as value one in this painting. I'm getting more confidence with the composition I've chosen.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Establishing the context

Last night, I decided the composition and size of the next landscape painting from my last vacation, and printed out a couple of versions of reference photos. It's a part of Shoshone Falls. Today, I sketched the composition on a sketch pad w/ a pen to test the composition within 18cm x 28cm space. Then stretched canvas on a frame of 18"x28" in size. I put the first coat of gesso on the canvas tonight.

Putting the new canvas aside, I started establishing the context of this cow painting with thin layers of paint. General value contrast is about ok. I probably need to make darker in the background to keep the focal point to be standing out. It's basically the same idea with "Family Time".

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Getting into the details of horse features

Started working on the detasils of the dark horse features. But I still can't decide the entire color scheme including the colors on the ground. It affects to the colors on the horses as well. I changed the ground to be lighter than before. I think I need to make the green part lighter as well with more yellow.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Blocking out shadows

Quickly blocked dark shadow areas. Not much exist in this painting though. Depending on how the contrast goes when I put more mid-light colors, I might invent some more dark areas on the ground.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

New Year, New Start

I started a new cow painting since the last one turned out well. The canvas size is same 14"x18". This time, however, I put underpainting with arizarin and burnt umber to create a warm surface. For the composition I used photoshop elem. to combine three cows from different photos. Then titled this as "Afternoon Talk". Since I keep erasing the drawing lines with solvent, the canvas lost some underpainting. I need to stop doing it once I got right proportions.