Passage to Northwind Close

One of my strengths as a painter, I think, is my ability to construct a realistic scene without having any material to work from. The key is to be able to use perspective and I am pretty good at that.  So while things worked out pretty good for this painting, it has the mood I was looking for, I am not all that happy with my lines. The passage twists and turns and I don't think I have the perspective quite right. I did a lot of alterations after I traced on the original design, and I don't think things worked out quite right, though I guess, good enough.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor canvas 

New Winter Scene underway

I've made a start on the next painting. It is going to be a dusk scene, so I have painted the walls a bit darker than I normally would at this point. As a rule, you can never paint too light with acrylics because you can always wash after wash of color over the existing colors to darken and alter the color to suit what you want to do, since once acrylics are dry they tend to stay put and not get muddy. However, since I know that the walls will be in deep shadow, I went a little darker for their first wash than I normally would. You can see the blue outlines of the buildings and I am planning on putting a group of large trees behind the central building in an unseen open square, so that a lot of the sky be overpainted with branches... if all goes well...  I will also have to add some figures as well, though with acrylics I can just put them over the existing paint where I want them -- I can scrub off some of the paint or just paint over with white paint if necessary.

Bakers Court

I worked on this piece yesterday and today, I just didn't get around to posting where I was yesterday.  This is another scene from the back alleys and lanes with old stables, sheds and barns converted into residences.  I like the  informality of this type of scenes vs. the more formal  and regular street scene, and the fact that these alleys are narrow means that I can more easily paint both sides without a great space in between is an added advantage. I also don't run much of a risk of being run over unlike painting in the middle of a street...

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

A'Top Lili Hill

Here is the finished version of A Top Lili Hill. This is the style of painting I did for more than a decade before moving to the thicker oil and acrylic paints some 6 years ago -- mainly because I was looking to sell paintings and watercolors do not command much of a price in the market, not to mention the expense of framing them.  I started using colored inks and moved on to watercolors because of a concern that inks would fade too fast. At the end I switched to acrylics on watercolor canvas like this painting because I could get the ease and brightness of ink without concern for fading. Working on canvas also allows for corrections to be made and they can be framed without glass.  All these paintings are scenes of an imaginary country and are painted from imagination in this rather folk art style.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

At the Top of Lili Hill -- in progress

This is today's work -- a new acrylic on watercolor canvas scene  in the 18x24" format.  Pretty much in the middle of the process -- the color of the buildings has to be built up some, figures and trees put in, shadows put in, etc. So far, so good...

Coach House Mews, Snowy Afternoon revised

Here is yesterday's painting with a simple black outline like the rest of the week's work, and I've cropped it to reflect a more standard 16x12" -- the 18x12" I paint on  is just half a 18x24" sheet.  I'm thinking I might want to invest a little more effort into using an outline. Right now I'm just using a gel ball point pen -- I might want to get a more dramatic and fluid line with a regular pen or brush. We'll see what next week brings...

Coach House Mews, Snowy Afternoon

This one is acrylics on watercolor canvas, my preferred combination. I wanted to paint a rather moody piece, but this did not turn out quite as I had hoped. Not sure what went awry.

18x12" 45x30cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

Manor Farm

The last of this week's experiments with watercolors and acrylics on paper. As I may have mentioned, I haven't painted on paper is probably six years. I must admit, I don't like it.  Next week I will move to watercolor canvas, which is what I switched to six years ago, at first because it gives the impression of being more durable than paper.  When I switched from watercolors on it to acrylics, I gained the additional advantage of not needing to put the picture behind glass, which some people object to because the reflections hide the picture. I like it because I can make changes and corrections, which you pretty much can't do on paper. 

18x12" 45x30cm acrylic and ink on 140lb Montval paper

Market Town Wharf

Making changes one variable at a time: today I did this one in acrylic paint rather than watercolors.  It is still on paper, however.

18x12" 45x30cm  acrylic and ink on 140 lb Montval paper

Winter Morning in the Back Courts

Today's watercolor.  I'm using past 'blueprints' as a basis for these paintings at the moment. I develop a scene using small thumbnail sketches and then scale them up to full size line drawings that I tape on the back of the good paper and trace from using a light box. This allows me not only to re-use the scene, but make alterations, and different crops, etc. This is only half of an original 18x24" 'blueprint' that I fist painted some years ago as a fall scene.

18x12" 45x30cm watercolor and ink on 140lb Montval paper

New Snow in the Back Courts

I'm thinking that the creative well is drying up a bit along the lines I have been painting, so that it is time for a change of pace. I haven't painted in watercolors in five or six years, so I thought I'd give that a shot today. I quickly realized why I haven't painted in watercolors in five or six years (even though I did it exclusively for a decade prior to that...): they are too iffy and unforgiving... I had to resort to cheating -- adding an ink outline -- to get a decent painting. I will stick with this style of painting for a while, though I think I will give watercolors a miss and go back to painting with acrylics in the watercolor style on watercolor canvas, which is what replaced watercolors in the first place.

18x12" 45x30cm watercolor on 140lb paper

Nocturne No. 4 -- in progress

This is not likely to be very close to the finished painting, but it is what I have this afternoon. Have to think about what I want to do.

Below is the revised Nocturne No. 3. I had started to rework it, decided to paint over it, and when that didn't work, scrapped what I had off, leaving something similar to what is below. I decided I would paint it that way, hence the new version -- a spring or summer evening.

Nocturne No. 3

Hero of the Boulevard is an alternate title.  Again, I'm just exploring what and how much color I want in these paintings... and I haven't figured it out yet.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Nocturne No. 2

Looking for the color of night. Yesterday's blues were a bit too cool for my taste. This one is a bit warmer, though perhaps a bit too muddy as well. I'm thinking what I did on the right side -- the blues and olives a purples is where I will go next.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Nocturne No. 1

As the name implies, this is my first study of painting night scenes in the city. I did this one mostly in blues, and used a short, stiff, round brush instead of my usual flat brushes. The subject is one of my stock scenes, but I was mostly concerned with color and technique this time around.  (Painted this over 'High in the Hills', which turned out to be too plain...

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

High in the Hills

We haven't had any snow to speak of, yet, so I was reluctant to paint snow pictures -- naming names... and all. However, with flurries blowing about today, I decided that I might as well take the chance. This is just a small minimalist scene that I improvised as I went along.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Morning Lark Square

I had an early edition of this painting started yesterday, but did not get around to posting it. I was far from sure it still would be around today. It and all the previous versions of this painting were more detailed than this, but I simply do not like that look for my work. I enjoy realistic paintings of other artists, but I'm just too ham fisted to make it work.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Rainy Eveing

What I really want to do is to create an impression of a place and time without just painting a scene. It might be a distinction without a difference, but I know I don't want to paint places, just impressions...

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

One of the nice things about painting just for yourself, is that you get to paint just what you like. The harder part is that you have no excuses -- deadlines, customer preferences, etc, that might explain a painting you have to make excuses for. Yesterday's painting was one of those, so I made another attempt at it today. I still am not thrilled, but I'm far from sure I can do any better.  My violets are just a big happy clump, that is hard to paint without going into a lot of detail that would be boring even if I could paint it.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard