Month: September 2015

Here’s a view of the marina on Amelia Island at sunrise. The high key warm and cool colors were so fun to work with on this one.

Here’s a painting of two intertwining trees along a creek in Settles Bridge Park. I keep trying to get on the other side of the Chattahoochee and thought that Settles Bridge was the answer. It looked to me like the path went right up to it but alas a little creek was the best I could find.

The color on this is a little nuts and I am thinking that painting in dense shade caused me to turn it up a little. That or they put something in my Dunkin Doughnuts coffee…

This painting is a serious mess, but I learned a lot through the process. During the workshop with John MacDonald, we talked a lot about high-key vs. low-key paintings. I had this one on the docket and realized it would be an ideal candidate for a high-key palette.

The goal was to use warm and cool colors to form the rocks. The color got me so off that I completely lost the drawing, and so it’s awful blobby. Oh well, it was a fun experiment, and I feel like I learned a lot more about warm and cool colors though this one.

Here’s the last one from my workshop in Highlands. The sketches and photos I got from the first day weren’t great, so I went back to No. 285 from earlier in the year. The light and overall composition was a much better fit for John’s style, and I think we made a lot of progress on this one.

Going through the process was mind bending. I thought No. 285 was a good painting but reworking it in this was took it to an entirely new place. The experience was about control and making calculated decisions to make the painting stronger. This is the kind of work I want to do but end up rushing or being impatient. The whole workshop was a great lesson in slowing down and trying to make something sing.

The main focus of the workshop I attended in Highlands was moving from Plein Air to the studio. This was such an important topic for me because that is one of my biggest struggles. The second day there I worked on moving the birdhouse the plein air study into a larger, 11″ x 14″ format. Our teacher, John MacDonald, helped me use more of a tonalist technique on this one and it was fun to try and carefully control the brushwork here.

No. 309 is a small plein air study from Highlands, NC. I attended a fantastic workshop last week with John MacDonald and the first day we started out by working outside. It was a really overcast day so the vistas I was looking for were pretty flat. There was enough light coming through the trees to make this scene have some depth and I decided to give it a shot.

I took a boat-load (literally) of shots from our trip to Lake Tahoe and have been excited about attempting a few of them. No. 308 is the first from that set and it was tricky to try and go back there in my mind as I painted this.