Before Dusk

I don't have an education in art, so I may be bring coals to Newcastle here, but I believe that the lines within a picture play an important part in the emotional response to a picture. In this case, my original sketches had a curve to the alley that was lost in the finished painting. I felt the straight lines of the finished painting (last post) made the picture cold and uninviting, so I decided to repaint the same scene, but with a curving alley instead, the result is above. Of course, doing the same basic painting again allows one to smooth out and improve the painting, but still I think this is an improvement, a much more inviting scene. I am not quite done with this painting just yet, but the work is mostly in the details and perhaps a bit more toning on the shadows... tomorrow morning's work.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

Along the Ravine Road (Night) Unfinished

Most paintings turn out to be less that I hope for -- and then, sometimes,  they turn out to be total disasters. Today's work is one such case. I opted to go for the night scene though I had some misgivings, and it turned out my misgivings were justified. The question now is do I keep working on this, or cut my loses and move on. I've decided to try it as a day scene --scrubbing off as much of the sky as I can, I'll have one more go at this tomorrow. 

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...

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