Oil Painting Process

Here is a painting that I have been working on for a bit. I photographed these Iceland Poppies in Berkeley. Behind them is a chain-link fence so I am trying to come up with a more pleasing background. Some would like the juxtaposition of the chain-link with the poppies, but that is not what I am going for here...maybe later. I am looking for suggestions for how to improve the background. Thoughts I had were to make it the corner of a building, white clapboards, grey patio, more greens, sky...

I turned it into black and white on my computer to see how my values are doing...

Not bad, but not great either. I think I could use more value change in the lower left and right corners as well as in, yep, the dredded background. If I went with a sky background, I could do a darker sky at the top fading to very light toward the flowers and foliage. Or I could do lighter on the right where the light is coming from, then fading darker toward the left. Hmmmm. Please help!

Spring Watercolor

Last week the Crocus were blooming, so in the afternoon I sat outside on the lawn and painted these plein air. Now that things are blooming and not frozen, I can practice painting flowers live rather than from photos.

Painting Practice

This is another exercise from my watersoluble oils class. Again, we used portions of paintings as a base for the exercise. The point was to mix warm light and cool shadow colors with the proper values and of course, to have all the values in the final painting relate to each other properly. I think I did well with the values in the face. I tried to make the hair a different color from the face in warm light, which wasn't necessarily part of the exercise. I don't really like how the hair turned out, but since I was finishing this at home, the paint for the hat and clothing (darkest) had dried, so I couldn't use it to make shadows in the hair. Also, since I was just copying values from another painting, I was not thinking about what I would do if I were painting a similar portrait. Overall, I think she looks like a 1980s rock star, but I do think I learned the point of the exercise and will remember it.

This is a quick, 30 minute, study of water flowing over a rock in a stream. Ted went fishing and I sat by the stream and wanted to practice painting flowing water. A friend of mine and I are going to do some painting together this summer and she said she wants to paint water, so I thought I'd better get some practice in! As we can all see here, much more practice is needed! But I thought I'd post this as a first, quick, unfinished (the fish were not biting and it was time for dinner) example for reference and to hopefully see improvement. First, I believe that a better sketch before painting would have made the water movement make a little more sense to the eye. Specifically, the rock in relation to its wave is off and that was because I was working quickly. Also, more color change in the distant water would be nice...

Class Work

I am 1/3 of the way through my watersoluble oils class. We've been using only primary colors plus white and working on mixing. We are using liquin to speed drying and thin the paint a little. I haven't tried using liquin with traditional oils so cannot compare the handling, but I will try it soon. We also did a value study and I chose to keep mine monochromatic. We are using some black and white photocopies of famous paintings as a base to do these exercises. Last night we started working on portraits using warm light and then cool shadows in the face. I didn't finish last night so will post it soon.



On the left, I mixed secondary colors green and violet to get "slate" colors. Then I mixed complimentary colors red and green to get some rusty browns. The liquin allows the white ground to show through the paint.