Thursday, February 28, 2013

Covering entire canvas

Especially when canvas is this big, which is much bigger than my recent regular paintings, it's important to cover the entire canvas from the beginning. Otherwise it would take forever to get to the finish line, and would likely lose cohesiveness or harmony of the painting as a whole. I intentionally started darker tones at this stage.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Trying to finish this up

After working on the greens today, I realized I don't have much area I can improve this piece any more. I can make those cows a little more precise and puts more contrast between highlighted area and shadowed area like legs. But that's all about I want to do before finishing this piece.
This would be the last update.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Adding value variations on the body

I haven't touched this a while but finally started finalizing the value shifts on the body of the main cow. It wouldn't take long but be careful not to smear colors each other. Then need to come up with a good way to finalize the pasture greens.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Seascape Series Continues

As soon as I finished, or before putting the last/after minute touches to North Edge, I started stretching/gessoing canvas for the next landscape painting. I'll continue painting seascapes and this one is Burrows Bay, which I originally painted on site in last September (see blog on Sep 17, 2012). The bay is on the opposite side of Fidalgo Island from Anacortes, facing Strait of Juan de Fuca. I wanted to make a little bigger painting than I regularly paint recently. 22"x30". The first stage, drawing, is the most difficult and critical of painting in bigger format. I'm spending a little longer time to draw to make sure everything is in the right place. Because I want to try different combination of colors and more bold brush strokes this time. I don't want to get bogged down by wrong shapes once I finished drawing and want to put my focus on colors&strokes.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

North Edge Final Update

This would be the final update. I'm putting final touches on this for mainly the part I don't like. It would never be perfect anyway, I don't worry much about perfection. I need to move on to the next with what I've learned from this piece.
For the next one, I might do a little bigger landscape I haven't done quite a while. It's about the time I need to try again.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Started finalizing rock surfaces

I'm approaching the last 100m of a mile relay on the track. I'm trying to finalize those rocks with proper texture, which is not too easy. I need to be careful not to smooth them up. When I getting into this stage, I tend to loose color variations and fall into mono tone. I need to keep checking.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Almost done with trees

Two weeks from the last update because I went to Kootenay Boundary, BC in-between. I might paint from some of photos I took there.
Anyway, I worked on the trees this evening and almost done. I'll probably come back and put some light green colors to show highlight but it would be almost at the end. I need to enhance the rock's colors and texture next.