Just keep painting

It's another fake watercolor, which I really have started wondering why I am doing. I think I'm experiencing some kind of time warp, because the only painting lessons I ever had were watercolor lessons, when I was eleven or twelve years old. I went through a second watercolor phase in the mid-'80's, and I was making good money then so I bought several Arches blocks, all of which I still have because that phase only lasted a year.

I do like that it's easy to make acrylics look like watercolors, but you can cheat to some extent because you can layer them if you give them a day or two to cure, and if you have to make big changes, you can switch to opaque mode.

I had pulled this composition out of a larger photo, because I liked the balance of it, but when I got it almost finished I realized it's really not a very interesting composition. The most dramatic thing I could think of to do with it was to darken the sky and put a few sunlight bits on the trees in the background.

I need to make the next one a bit more adventurous. I hope. Just keep painting.

A limited color palette

Last week I started work on another one of my recent landscape shots, one of the Tualatin River near the historic community of Willamette on an overcast afternoon. I worked on it for a few sessions, trying to make something I liked out of it. In the end I felt happy with the colors I got, and some of the brushwork, but it still falls way short of what I'd like to be able to do. I was looking at one of my favorite books on painting, Ted Goernschner's "The Workshop Experience" and decided I want to do some experimenting with limited color palettes. I wanted to reuse the same composition, using a split complementary color scheme of yellow, red-violet and blue-violet. For the first time, I succeeded in getting some photos of the painting process. I only did one session a day on this, as I needed to take that much time between sessions to screw up my courage and go forward with these rather unfamiliar colors.

The first session was limited to blocking in the larger masses, except for the tree foliage on the left. Not sure why, but I left that till last.

In the second session I worked on the background, the foreground, and the shrub and tree structures.

In the last session, I finally laid down the tree foliage and made a few more adjustments in the shrubs in the foreground.

I'm going to stop here for now, even though it doesn't look finished to me. I want the colors to soak into my brain for a while. Maybe they'll help me grow some new brain cells that aren't bogged down in a rut. I keep thinking of something Carolyn Lewis said in her video, about painting from photos: "Make your painting look better than the photograph."

And by the way, Happy 2012, and I hope it's a great year for everyone!