This is a pond my Dad and Grandfather dug. I have many fond memories of swimming here. After a long, hot day of work in the summer we would jump in to cool off. Was wonderful! It is always a good spot for a photo with good lighting. Now it makes a good painting.
I continue to find trees extremely challenging yet I am seeing progress. It is a challenge to know where to begin some of these pictures of the woods, but I felt like I at least had some direction this time. I still feel like this could be improved on if I did it again, but I’m happy with it for now. I’m still feeling a strong attraction for painting woodland scenes and especially trees themselves, in fact I found a guy that paints ‘tree portraits’ yesterday on Pintrest. His name is David Langevin. His stuff is amazing. It may be a similar direction I’d like to go in eventually. You can check out his work on whiterockgallery.com. Just search his name.
I continue to find that I like to paint the light. The photos or scenes that catch my attention the most have some sort of a strong impact created by the light. I really want to explore this more. I am finding that it takes quite a bit of practice to see the effects of light correctly. You almost need to outsmart your brain when painting in order to correctly evaluate the colors and values that you see. Challenging!
This is a collection of 4×4 paintings that I did this week. They are copies of larger paintings by a friend who’s work I particularly like. His brush strokes are quick and sketchy and his paint is quite thick and textural. Another thing I like about it is his color choices. He uses a few different colors than I was using and I enjoyed adding these to my pallet. (the new ones were sap green, cad orange light, and yellow ochre)
I really enjoyed these little studies. I got a feel for the look and light, as well as a bit more texture. I think this was very helpful.
So these are 2 of the paintings I did as I struggled this week. When I edited the colored one and looked at it in black and white it was not too far off from this one on the left that I painted in one color. I have yet to be successfull with this painting, but I thought I would show you where I am coming from. I will continue to try capturing this to my satisfaction, but probably not today ( =
This is a painting of our ski area in Juneau called Eagle Crest. It is a beautiful place to hike. I love the warm colors and the reflections in the water. I wanted the dark area in the distance to look more shaded from the sun than it does, I need to work on that. But this was a fun painting to do. (It is 8×10)
Art with my Coffee 