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Sketching Practice: Faces and Gesture
I haven’t painted anything since my last Farm Road painting, but I haven’t been idle. I have been working on my draftsmanship by trying to draw my way through the Portrait and Figure Drawing courses on Proko.com. I purchased the Portrait course a long time ago, and won the Figure drawing course in the Proko […]
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Proko Challenge: Landscape #5
I wanted to write up each Landscape thumbnail that I painted, but I ended up needing to dedicate the time to the challenge itself in order to finish on time. I am very pleased with the results that I got from doing this, and I think I’ll be working thumbnails like this into my workflow […]
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Proko Challenge: Landscape Thumbnails #2
This is the second post about the Proko Landscape Thumbnails challenge. The challenge was to submit five landscape paintings, each 2 inches wide by 2 inches tall. I started this painting off wanting to paint trees in the distance using wet-in-wet. I tend to do this often, but in my mind, there is this technique […]
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Proko Challenge Landscape Thumbnails: #1
Proko has a challenge going right now, and I decided I would try to enter. I hope I can finish in time. The challenge is to paint 5 thumbnail landscapes. They can be painted in any medium, but they must be 2” x 2” large. The biggest focus of the challenge is to learn how […]
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Bargue Plate: Homer
It’s been a while! I haven’t posted recently because I got Covid, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. If you are curious, read on. Skip ahead if you don’t care about Covid. TL/DR; Covid is real, and really dangerous for some people – but I’m fine and I never got terribly sick. My […]
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Drawing Practice
I have decided to put a more concerted effort toward being a better draftsman, because of all the things I have tried, nothing has improved my paintings more than practicing drawing. I don’t know “how” to practice drawing. I have seen a thousand videos of people drawing. I’ve watched dozens of tutorials explaining perspective, edges, […]
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Farm Road: End of Year 3
Well, I’ve been painting for three years now. It’s time for me to do my little progress check. When I first started painting, I decided to try to paint the same thing every day for one month. It was the first watercolor painting I had ever really tried, and I figured painting it over and […]
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Bluebird: #2
I have been feeling stuck in a bit of a plateau for a while now. I decided to take a break from painting for a bit because my lack of progress was troubling me. I then watched a video on YouTube that convinced me that I need to put more effort into understanding construction and […]
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Master Study: Michal Jasiewicz, Part 2
I went into excruciating detail about my proposed process for recreating this painting by Michal Jasiewicz in the previous post. Today, I’ll explain how I took the lessons I learned from that exercise to try the painting a few more times, and experiment with different options. This was my first attempt. A few things I learned […]
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Master Study: Michal Jasiewicz – Part 1
A user on Reddit posted this image, asking how the artist (Michal Jasiewicz) achieved the effect on the distant cliffs. I am not sure how he accomplished it exactly, but I posted this as my best guess. I don’t know how they did it, but here’s what I would try. Forgive the over explanation, I […]
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Catching Up
It’s been a while since I posted, because I haven’t been able to get the WordPress app to work. Today, I finally figured it out, so I’m just going to toss up photos of the paintings I have made in the down time, so I have them to look back at later.
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Cloudy Sky: #4
I decided to try that painting again. I was going to try some exercises with back runs, and water, but before I knew it I was painting. So… here it is. There are some things that I really like here, and some things I definitely want to do differently. But, I think I’m done with […]
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Cloudy Sky: #3
I think I might need to rename this painting. Now at the third iteration, I think it’s more about the rocks and vegetation than it is about the sky. At any rate, I have volunteered to work part-time during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a very strange time in the world right now, and I don’t […]
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Cloudy Sky: #2
Today I tried painting that barn that’s in my memory again. There are some things that worked better here than in the first one, and some that didn’t work out. I feel better prepared now for number 3. Here is the sketch I made before painting this one. I really tried to increase the visual […]
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Cloudy Sky: #1
On my drive last week to Lutz Lock, where I failed at painting the old lock from the Erie Canal, I saw a barn on the side of the road that I remember thinking looked like a nice one to paint. I didn’t stop though, and only have the scene and in my memory. Today, […]
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Barn in Walhonding: Studies
I think I’ve learned my lesson by now… before I paint, I need to study my subject. And, what’s the point of doing all these studies if I don’t take the time to reflect on them to better evaluate what I’ve learned by doing them? That’s the purpose of this post – I want to […]
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Tree Study
I wanted to paint something from my imagination the other day, and this is what I came up with. It’s an attempt to mimic a style that I saw in a painting by Joseph Zbukvic, and now that I look at it again, I feel like it’s close enough to his composition to say that […]
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It’s all part of the journey
I have to remind myself over and over… you are only a year and a half into this. I’m a sophomore in high school… I should expect to paint like I’m sixteen. I have been running into a slew Of failed painting again. I’m not sure why exactly. For some reason I’m no where near […]
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I Will
My last post was a pretty big downer. I’m glad I wrote it because it’s honest. But it also highlighted how inadequate I have been feeling lately. That post was titled “I can’t.” Today, I decided to paint and post again, and I wanted to title this one, “I can.” But that’s not honest. I […]
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Glitter War Studies: Pegacorn
My brother asked me to paint a picture for his daughter, with two princess castles caught in a glitter war with flying unicorns and rainbows. I did a few studies on it last week, and over the weekend I painted the Pegacorn as a draft. I want to experiment with how to paint that because […]
