Sailboats

Sailboats is another 'on site' painting. This painting was done entirely on site with only some minor adjustments done in the studio. I am very pleased with this painting.

Billings Estate Ottawa

This is an on site mixed-media painting using water colour and ink. It had been a while since I had done any water colour painting so this was a fun change.

Barn Shovels

The weekly summer paint outs that I attend with the Manotick Art Association have started up again. This year I have decided to do mainly acrylic paintings on a prepared piece of thin plywood.
Our first session was held at the hobby farm of one of our members in Heckston, Ontario. It poured that day so I decided to paint in the barn - hence the shovels. This was my first 'on site' acrylic painting and I really struggled with the paints. In hindsight I think I was struggling because of the amount of humidity in the air. I also struggled with the colours for two reasons: the lighting was less than desirable and I was not able to mix the colours that I wanted. As a result of my difficulties I did not get too much of the painting done on site. The full view of the shovels (my 'on site' painting) became mostly a studio painting.
The view of the shovel handles detail is a small (6 X 6 inch) studio painting that I did from my photo after playing around with my cropping tool and texture tool on my photo editing program. I do really like my detail painting.

Workshop Paintings

Back in November I took a weekend acrylic painting workshop with Charlie Spratt , a member of Manotick Art Association and a very good painter. His goal was to teach us the process of doing a painting from start (thumbnails) to finish. The workshop was on a Saturday and a Sunday and each day we 'completed' a painting ... well almost.

Another goal was to keep the painting loose with minimal detail ... this is what really attracted me to the workshop since I tend to be very detail-oriented in my painting. Everyone did the same scenes but it was amazing how different the paintings were!

I really felt that I learned a lot in the workshop especially since up until that point I had been learning how to use acrylic paints by trial and error.

Life on the Beach

These two paintings are scenes from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. While in Cape Hatteras Matthew and I visited a Artist Cooperative Gallery. One artist, Richard Neilsen, really inspired me. He used some very vibrant under paintings and let them show through the painting especially around the edges. I tried to use this technique with both these paintings. With the seagull painting I first painted the canvas with a bright red-orange and with the couple painting I first painted the canvas with ultramarine blue. I think I was more successful with letting the undercoat shine through with the seagull painting. I found it harder to come up with the bright sunny day feeling starting with the ultramarine blue canvas.
It was an enjoyable and educational experience for me. I am quite pleased with both these paintings.

Four Season's on the Farm

 I once saw a painting in a magazine that was a triptych of one city scape depicting three seasons. I thought it was really neat so wanted to try something similar. Four Seasons on the Farm is made up of four 6" X 6" Masonite panels loosely depicting a local farm through the four seasons. The biggest challenge in creating this painting was to have a sense of continuity both in the subject matter and with the colours. Winter, with it's stark whites, was the hardest to assimilate into the series. My favourite of the four panels is Spring which just seemed to flow out of my brush.

Sunbeams Edited

 Last time that I posted my painting Sunbeams, I received a few comments about the 'red scrub' in the background so I decided to tone it down a bit. I only touched the scrub  in the original painting - it is the photo that gives the impression that I darkened the entire painting.

Sunbeams

Preliminary Painting

Sunbeams was inspired by a photo I took one morning in September while we were camping at Sauble Falls in the Bruce Peninsula. The mornings were quite cold so people down the road from us had a very smoky fire going which really accentuated the early morning sun coming through the trees. I love being able to see sunbeams.

Finished Painting

I wasn't sure if I would post this painting quite yet since it is in the spirit of what I learned at a workshop back in November given by Charlie Spratt about being loose in Acrylic painting. Really, I should have first posted the paintings done during that workshop but both of those still need a bit of work before posting and who knows when I will do the required work. I describe the techniques used to paint Sunbeams as being a painting 'a la Charlie Spratt'. I did the preliminary monochromatic painting on the canvas without a prior pencil sketch. When this was dry I painted the colours over top. in one sense I found this difficult since I really liked my preliminary painting and was afraid of ruining the effects that I had captured. On the other hand it is a really good way of laying in a painting without worrying about getting it exactly right - that is really freeing!

This past winter I bought a book featuring the paintings of The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson and also a book featuring a painter named Bruno Cote who paints with a similar style. My purpose for buying these books was to be inspired by the style since I would like to be able to paint using a similar style. I feel that I may have approached a Group of Sevenish style in my foreground trees in Sunbeams.