Pet

Finished. On to the next projects!

Pet

I'm doing this for a friend who says that her friend's dog died. She was poisoned by someone. Her friend was going to go to an animal portrait artist who charged a lot of money, but I said let me do it. Pro Bono. It has been such a wet day that the paints (acrlylic) took their time in drying so I ended up painting wet on wet, which is something I don't normally do. I suppose that's how it feels to paint with oils and the underpainting looked like a wet oil.

I used to paint a lot of animals in miniature back in the day and then, it was the most striking work I did. (This is not a miniature.) Since then, I got married, had a child, and the ol eyesight is not what it used to be. Back then I really had no real responsibilities and was not interrupted every five minutes and I think I had had more sleep and a steadier hand. But at this age, I must admit, I make better decisions when creating and am more calm and relaxed and deliberate. Age does has its advantages. I will post this again when I am finished.

Painting in Process:

Much better on this one. More to go, loving those purples and oranges again...

Roccoco object from the Getty.

More images from the Getty; same picture.

OOps, hey, I forgot the Sorrolla!

I tend to love the Neo-Classic stuff; always have since a teenager. I also love the ceramic Jesus, which was not a real great piece in itself, but photographed beautifully, even with a crappy cell phone. An image which may be painted in the future.
I could not get over how realistic the tiger fur was; you could almost reach out and touch it. I don't think it was an Alma-Tadema like the one at the bottom but within that genre. The Alma-Tadema was mindblowing.

I have more images, but for some reason, Blogger will not let me post them...:(
The image at the top must have been painted with a single hair brush in the final details. Beautiful clarity in painting execution; every detail in sharp focus. The middle painting was of course a Sargent, but not a great Sargent example. I thought the most interesting part was the hand. Then there was a sumptious cat which was very buttery; the portrait of the woman itself was not as fresh nor inspired.

I went to the Getty Center yesterday with a friend. I apologize about the quality of the photos; I took them with my phone camera. I am looking for a few things: Real paintings with real paint strokes. Particularly interested in how painters dealt with several figures in a picture to tell a story and having the story still read clearly. I have been painting several figures in a background (digitally) for a client and am learning how to simplify the story in terms of light, or warm and cool colors. I am also looking at the paintings as abstract colors.

Threw away my black, my earth colors and went for the primaries and secondaries. This one is a little bigger than the rest, about 8.5 x 6' acrylic on canvas paper. This was a lion bronze, a part of a bigger sculpt at the Huntington Gardens.

Having a love affair with thalo blue, diox purple and cad red light and magenta and violets.

I have been taking a lot of thumbnail pics from my phone and using them to practice with color mixing in acrylic on canvas paper. I was trying to do a small painting a day, but there is no way I can find time to do this.

Got rid of black and earth colors from my palette for now.

Quickies
Some quick color studies. This one roughly 3 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Focusing on warm cool color relationships. This will help me color mix in digital. Acrylic on canvas paper.

Dawn!
This is the second fantasy illustration in a story telling series. This is the second full illustration I have done in Photoshop and yes, you can say I bit off more than I could chew..

Self critique:

What did I learn?

I need to work on:
-Overall consistency. I think that is true for most digital illustrators because the tools are so varied and there are so many choices.

-Getting better at color mixing, badly, badly needed here, too much black over all!

-Better management of files, organizing, layering, etc

-Push for better lighting

-Getting to know my digital brushes, picking my favorite ones and using them for better overall consistency

-Work more abstractly first, before the form

It was only towards the very end I felt I was finally painting a little in Photoshop. When I first began the color/value lay out on this, looking back on it I should have layed everything out in pure color-not a gray scale layout. Color should have been addressed first, because there is too much black, not enough warms and cools playing off each other. I learned this while painting the small plein aire color sketches in Tahoe (see earlier posts)

Last Day at Eagle Falls, Tahoe
I got up at 4 am to get to Eagle Falls by 6 to see the sun rise. What a morning. I couldn't decide on whether to climb the falls down to Emerald Bay or paint. I did a little of both.

Eagle Falls is one of my favorite places period. Nothing compares to it's beauty, so casual and abundant. No one was there that morning. I decided to paint small, simplify, getting better on using a system of brushstrokes, brights and filberts, getting to know them better and of course being more abstract.

Top upper left was the first and I nailed it.

Top upper right was the second one and I was on a narrow bridge at about 8 when tourists started to stagger in. I do not like people behind me and got real jumpy since this bridge is a very high traffic tourist area. I lost concentration and left.

Bottom left had an incredible example of a wonderful blue reflective light at the big boulder's base. I was intent on capturing that. I was getting tired about now, at 10 am. Decided not to paint anymore. A woman dropped by looking over my shoulder and started talking so much I thought she was going to tell me her life story.

Bottom Right. Then hiked all the way up to Eagle Lake carrying about 15 pounds of paints, water and lunch in high elevation, sweating and panting for breath up broken granite and an incredible path, found this lovely little composition at Eagle Lake. Had to paint it, by then it was 12. Wanted to describe the shadows with blobs of blues using a limited palette.

The Palette:
Greens: Thalo green, Chromium Oxide Green, Hansa yellow (my new favorite yellow. Ugly right out of the tube, but mixes great to get cool highlights in greens as well as wonderful warm neutrals for rock)
Sky: Colbalt turquoise (teal), cerulean blue, tit.white
Rock: Raw Sienna, Hansa yellow (like 2%), black, tit. white, chromium oxide green (like 1%) or cerulean blue (1%)

Small acrylic color sketches on 8 1/2 by 11 canvas paper

This is from Bliss Park which is right before Eagle Falls. I've always wanted to get to Bliss but always ran out of time. It's paradise here, incredibly blue, turquoise water up to blunt rocky cliffs~cliffs small enough that the local teenagers were leaping off the boulders into the icy water. My nine year old daughter took her turn and as a mom, it was hard to watch.

Acrylic on canvas paper. Taken from cell phone.

The last one I did yesterday-a real quickie, as Greg and Sienna were tapping their feet by this time. I hated to leave.

I did not bring a scanner so these are all taken on my cell phone.