Sunday, December 29, 2013

Not much progress on this deer series I

After spending some time to enhance the deer shape and color, I only realized I couldn't make it better much even if I spend hours more. Although I'm still half-way done for the background spruce trees and grassy foreground, I think this would be the final update before finishing this piece.
I'll put probably a red dashed line to indicate the sliding gap between upper and lower parts at the end to finish this.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Starting New Series - Mountains

Last 1.5 years or so I'd been focusing on scenes relating to water like ocean, lakes, rivers, and the final outcome of the effort would be the coming up show at PLG in Feb titled as "NW H2O Alchemy".
Now it's time to move on to the next series or theme - Mountains - which is viewed along hiking trails I've been exploring for about a year by now. The first one is from last Hurricane Ridge trip at the end of summer. It was at elevation 6,000 ft Klahhane Ridge I hiked. 24x32. I just started drawing.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Still try finding right value combinations

After watching Tim Deibler's DVD "Finding Geometric Shapes in the Landscape", he gave me for free at the last workshop, I tried filling all background (colored area) with more proper values. The foreground should be more lighter but also more colorful. But now I can see spruce shapes clearer. I used only #8 flat brush for this.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Making Spruce Shapes

Started making spruce shapes. This part is the one I don't know how it would end up. One thing I'm sure now is I have to make the directions of major branches somewhat identifiable to balance with deer and short plant shapes on the bottom half. I'm still not sure the color cordination at the outside of the rectangular.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Roughly Filled Inside of Rectangle

After filling darkest darks in top half, roughly filled bottom half inside of the rectangle with oranges and yellow greens. Now I need to decide the monotone color outside. Originally I was thinking reddish purple, just like I did with "Dash". But now I'm leaning toward some kinds of orage, like deer's body color.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Let's put a landslide in

I decided putting in a rectangular in this painting, which is split into two pieces and the top one is sliding down a little bit. Both top and bottom pieces would have full colors in them and the outside part would be monotone. So, to show the sliding line, I would have to paint an actual line, maybe a dashed line. Since this is the 11th piece for this year I'm going to try finishing it by the end of the month/year. Last year or before, I finished only 10 pieces or less. This would be for my personal record if I could finish by then.
But at the same time, I want to start a new landscape painting as well, which I haven't decided what to paint yet.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

One last round of pushes

If this were me a year ago or before, I would have stopped painting at this point and call it done. I'm now able to see problems and, more importantly, I know how I could fix them. Besides, it's already December and the next clear day for photos after I finish wouldn't come until Tue or Wed. So no need to rush and finish yesterday, the last day of Nov.
First I need to make another big batch of sky colour and re-shape tree edges on the island with sky holes. Then bring up background trees/forest to be lighter. I would touch a little more on the greens and yellows on the island to give them more value contrast. Then finally re-work on the edges of stones to give more sense that most of them are submerged.
That's all I have to finish this piece. After all, this would be one of my best paintings ever. I decided changing the title to "Summer Dream - Crescent Bay" because this view looked exactly like a summer dream in winter.