Saturday, May 8, 2010

New Work in Progress

i started out with a few sketches to check the composition and play with the values a little bit


then i took some gouache and did a color study as a dry run for the oil painting.
if you go thru my 650 posts prior to my stay in key west you never saw a drawing on any painting i ever did. see a scene, jump out paint it! bOOM! no thought or designing (in my head, but not on paper), just painting and hoping for the best. not the best way to do a great painting. a really good way to MAYBE get one tho'. and i did get some good ones that way but i want to make sure every one i do is the absolute best i think i can do at that time.
not to say that your painting will be great just because you think it thru, sketch it out, or plan it. but you have a waaaaay better chance of doing one if you do, right?

2 comments:

Caroline Peña Bray said...

I'm not so sure, Caravaggio is famed (and, during his lifetime, was decried) for not working from drawings and for painting directly from life onto canvas. And look how his works turned out! :) He's also famous for painting the same carafe motif over and over again, always using the same lighting for the object. He never adjusted the lighting of the carafe to fit the current scene he was working on. It's taken us 400 years to notice and we still regard him a genius. He never ceases to amaze or amuse me :)

Margo said...

I'm enjoying watching your process evolve, thanks for sharing. I'm getting ready for a trip to the Mississippi delta and wonder if I need to protect my oil paints from the heat or if they will be okay in a bag in the car. May sound silly but don't want to ruin a major investment in paints.