Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Many Dancers in a Wall of Plant

I've been painting the early-growing milkweed in the field. Lots of color and movement, and fantastic forms (the milkweed plants), which I need to try harder to capture.

I start out focusing on form and then end up abandoning that approach in order to create some kind of all-over cohesion through movement and color. But it might be a good thing to go back and re-emphasize form (the shapes of the plants) near the end. It's hard to relinquish an attention to form when the forms are that beautiful.

At first, I didn't think it would work at all to attempt a "wall" of flora/plant like that, but it seems that as long as a background is hinted at (here, a line of trees on the horizon), and you manage to get the reflected sky-tones in the lower half of the image, it can work. And using a vertical rectangle or a square format seems to help too. Maybe, though, it has less to do with adhering to certain dimensions than making sure you include the "feet" of the image, and don't crop it off at the knees—that is, show the very bottoms of the stems and the dark tones in the depths of the grass. The overall effect is like a big party/carnival with many dancers.

 

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Bright Tree and Blue
























11 x 11 inches, oil on board, 2014. I painted this while making a demo video for the first time (see my previous post here, or at my website here). It was a beautiful day for it, with brilliant colors and red-winged blackbirds and bullfrogs chorusing in the background.

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Plein Air Painting Demo Video - How to Tone & Sketch in Oil

Got up the nerve to make a demonstration video, filled with suburban painting sounds: red-winged blackbirds, mourning doves, and bullfrogs chorusing along with the beeps from a backing-up pickup truck :-)