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Stippled Tree: #1
Today, instead of painting, I sat down and tapped dots on a piece of paper for five hours. I started by wondering if I reduced a cloud to spheres, and then shaded them if it would help me to paint them better. But then I got carried away with the stippling, and five hours later, […]
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Old Oak Tree: #1
My goal tonight was to try a composition I haven’t tried before. I have been looking through paintings by Eyvind Earle, and saw several compositions of his that struck me as interesting. I realized that they all were very much singular in their scope. Even his most complex compositions are still all about one thing. […]
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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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Edge of the Woods: #1
When we were at Malone Thanksgiving I took a handful of photos that I want to paint. This weekend, I painted the second one for the first time. The morning when I took this photo, the whole world was quiet. I was awake before Rachel and the girls, and I decided to take the time […]
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I Will: #1
This is my quarter sheet draft of the painting I worked on the past two days. I wrote a lot about it in the post about the studies so I won’t go into much detail here on the process. But, I do want to show some of the photos from the process, and reflect a […]
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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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Abandoned Shed: #1
I don’t have much motivation to write up on this one. Which is unfortunate because I liked it. But I did take one photo of the techniques I used. Basically, I painted one color. Then, while that was still wet, I dabbed pigment into it to get some variance. Once that dried, I then wetted […]
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Creek Bridge: #1
Tonight, the goal was to paint a creek, paying attention to perspective, and atmosphere. When I started, there was no bridge in my mind, but a bloom seemed to suggest one, so I went with it. I don’t have a reference sketch or photo for this one, I’m just kind of laying down layers and […]
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Log Bridge: #1
I wanted to practice figure painting a bit more, so I invented a scene, and tried to paint it. My idea was to try to paint a picture of a guy carefully walking across a log. It’s something I’ve done more than a few times fishing, but I’ve never photographed it, so I had to […]
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Fall: #1
I decided to put the glitter war painting aside for a week or so, because I was getting a little burned out on it. In an attempt to perform a mental software reset, I painted this today very quickly. My goal was to paint this without revisiting washes. I was successful in leaving things largely […]
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Tree Sketches
I wanted to explore some ideas for how I might style the trees in this painting that I’m going to do. I think I know how I’ll tackle everything else (at least I have a strategy for how I plan to attack it) but I haven’t decided on a style for the trees yet. This […]
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Cottonwood: #2
Tonight I decided I would try that cottonwood painting again after all. Once again, I wanted to focus on a limited palette, so I went with Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, and Ultramarine Violet. I went with Ultramarine Violet instead of Quin Purple because I figured it might give me more red… not sure if that […]
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Cottonwood: #1
I wanted to paint something from my imagination tonight, and tried to focus on neutralized colors. One thing my paintings suffer from (among others) is that they often make use of very high key colors, and often don’t have much color harmony as a result. So I decided to make a painting using just three […]
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Flooded Park: #1-3
I was driving home from the garage a few months ago after getting new tires, and saw that the park on Middlebranch was flooded. So, I pulled into the parking lot and snapped some photos. I particularly liked this one: The first time I painted it, I was far too heavy handed on every inch […]
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Hartville Barn After a Storm: #3
I went to my brother’s birthday party today, and my Aunt Virginia asked about my paintings. I mentioned that I’ve been doing a lot of fishing lately, and haven’t been painting as much. I am going fishing tomorrow, from sun up to sun down (cross my fingers that this rain passes.) So, when I got […]
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Hartville Barn After a Storm: #1
I really was not happy with my NYC paintings, so I decided to go back to subjects that truly interest me, and that brings me to this barn. A few weekends ago, I was driving home from a day on the lake, and drove through an immense storm. When the clouds cleared out the sky […]
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Appalachian Sky: #2
This is my second attempt at painting a view of the valley in the Appalachian mountains from our vacation in Elk Banner, South Carolina. In this version, I expanded the field of view considerably, and it no longer matches the field of view that I have in my mind. In my mind, looking at the […]
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Shade Tree: #1-3
I took a picture of this tree in the park today. I liked the way the light filtered through the leaves, and how the trunk gradually shifted from a sandy brown to near black. I tried to paint it. Though the paintings were awful, I wanted to post them anyway – because this blog is […]
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Back Porch: #1-3
Joseph Zbukvic is my favorite watercolor artist right now. (I know – how original.) Because I admire his work so much, I watch a lot of videos of him painting whenever I find one on YouTube. I have heard him say a handful of times, “There are no bad subjects, only bad paintings.” I also […]
