Heading for the Loft

Winterlude Part 3

"Winterlude" almost there!

I keep adding colour and detail throughout the entire scene.  I want to maintain a balance so that I can judge each new brush stroke against the overall look of the painting.  If you concentrate too much on one area you may find that it doesn't work so well after the rest of the painting is completed.  You also run the risk of 'falling in love' with how that particular area of your work looks and you may not want to make necessary changes as you go forward.  By working more or less equally across the painting, you can maintain a healthier and more impartial perspective on your work.

Here I have painted in the distant trees using a mixture of sap green, ultramarine blue and titanium white.  Ultramarine blue dominates to create an illustion of distance.  Now the local colour of the barn is introduced.  I decided on a soft yellow to promote the feeling of bright sunlight on a cold winter day. I add snow to the branches of the spruce tree in front of the barn and generally add more detail to everything.  I introduce a slight hint of warmth in the sky on the right side of the painting, again to establish a feeling of bright sunlight coming from that direction.  Now I embellish the soft shadows in the snow and on the snowy branches in the foreground using a mixture of ultramarine blue and titanium white.

"Winterlude" 9 X 12 inches acrylic on board

I work fairly consistently over the entire painting as I go along, so everything comes together quite nicely as I near the finish.  I add small details and highlights as necessary, such as brightening the snow on the barn roof, spruce tree, fence and middle ground to suggest bright light in these areas.  I add bits of snow in the forks of tree branches beside the barn and I strengthen the blue shadow areas.

The last area to concentrate on is the foreground.  Layers of detail and colour are added to the birds to make them appear close to the viewer.  The pine needles are finished off with darker and more detailed brush strokes using a combination of sap green and lamp black,  The tree branches are painted in quickly with burnt sienna and lamp black in the shadows.

In order to increase the contrast between the sunny background and the shadowed foreground, I add a glaze of ultramarine blue and mat medium over most of the pine branches and the birds until I see a clear division between the two areas.  Once the signature is added, the painting is finished!

Automotive Art

'84 Corvette' 11X14 Acrylic on board

I seem to have great difficulty in keeping the old blog up.  The last post was  in late January and now it is mid-April already!  Too many distractions I am afraid.  Many days I plan on writing a post but once the day gets started everything changes and I find myself emmersed in something entirely different.  There just never seems to be enough hours in the day!

I used to do a lot of car art for various auto manufactures.  Ford, GM, Nissan, Toyota, Saab and Jeep, to name a few.  This kind of work can be very time consuming and usually requires a great deal of precision and attention to detail since the finished art is closely inspected by engineers.  The trick is to be true to the design but also instill artistic flair at the same time.  This painting was done with a combination of pen and ink and painted and airbrushed acrylic.  The background was painted on a surface roughened with gesso and a stiff brush before the lettering and symbols were painted by hand.  The car and reflection were partly brush painted and then airbrushed with acrylic to create a glowing shine.

This was before computer art and photoshop, so the art is all one piece, painted simultaneously on one piece of illustration board.  Everything was done by hand in those days!

'32 Packard'  11X14 acrylic on canvas 

This one is a very different approach.  I worked on canvas this time and completed almost the entire picture using a brush and acrylic paints.  The background was applied using a very thin and drippy mixture of mat medium, acrylic paint and water.  The ghost image was painted in with monochromatic detail before additional applications of darker and slightly heavier paint were added to the upper section of the canvas.  The feature car was painted in detail and strong colour before a few whispy highlights were applied using an airbrush.

I was quite pleased with the effective colour and contrast of texture and detail in this painting.  To me, it conveyed a feeling of age of the vintage car but a sense of perfection in the restoration being portrayed at the same time.

Both of these auto paintings were originally commissioned as car magazine covers.  These were wonderful assignments and I enjoyed doing a series of similar paintings for more than a year before the publication ultimately folded.