Coming Alive-8x10

If you like this one contact me for price and availability



Another step-by-step of a larger work ive got in my head. here's a digital pic of the scene
note: see why i dont like to paint from photos? i know you can photoshop it and saturate the colors up but those arent the real color harmonies now are they? much better to stand there and mix what you see. this way it smacks of reality, and why wouldnt it?

then....

i begin with a few thumbnails after climbing down into the marsh. i had two ideas but after drawing them i liked the top left scene better than the reflections of some trees i liked too. i moved the land mass over in the middleground, edited out the rocks in the foreground to make the rocks in the middle ground the most detailed (focal point) and more prominent, and zoomed in on the scene.


i lay down a yellow ochre/orange acrylic underpainting and then mix up colors close to the shapes with oil paint and Liquin. Here i'm more interested in getting the value right and i'm trying to hone in on the temperature and hue, but thats secondary.



after i finished the plein air pc, i realized that there was one trouble spot on the piece coming out of the field (before fixing it later this afternoon). so i went to eat lunch and think about how to resolve it. decided to go back and take some reference photos of that one area giving me a problem. took my sketchbook back and wrote some notes on it that you can see on the sketchpad to remind me in the studio what might help fix it. between that and the photos i was able to resolve the problem.

my new mantra "its not how many you can do in a day, but how many good ones can you do, period" is making me alot less production oriented and more quality oriented. that means slowing down, doing sketches, thinking, fixing etc. when all youre concerned about is numbers its absurd to even consider such steps. no time! this new MO will take a year or so to get firmly ingrained in me but better paintings will be worth it. hopefully my conversion rate (paintings done: to paintings sold) will increase and reward me. Being thoughtful and trying to do paintings that dont have glaring problems is hard work. much easier to bang em out and not think about the end product too much. just being honest


i'll use the finished 8x10 as a dry run for the big one, which should slide off the brush with all this prelim preparation. thats the plan, anyway.