January 2015

The winter session of my painting class has started and as usual, the first couple of weeks us continuing students were free to paint whatever we wanted. I had several photos picked out as possible subjects, but I forgot to bring them to the first class. Ron brings to the class a big stack of prints of miscellaneous photos, so I chose one of a French village street scene. It turned out to be a good choice and it was a lot of fun to paint. I am quite pleased with how it turned out, and I got many compliments from my classmates.

December 2014

 

I finished up the fall session of my painting class with one more painting, a beach scene. It was based on a photo that was dominated by the mass of dune grass on the right, and the fence across the bottom. I didn't like the composition much, and I changed it a bit, but I could have changed it more. After I had done most of the grass, Ron commented that it was a bit too uniform. I tried to vary it, but with the dark shadows already in place, I couldn't do very much. But I like how the colors came out, and overall I think it is pretty good.

One afternoon a week or so ago, Maureen and Cherry were going to ride our horses, and I went along to help with the work, but mostly just to sit and watch them ride. It was nearly sunset and the view of the bay beyond the arena was really beautiful with warm colors and low-angle lighting. I thought that it might be fun to try to paint, so I took a few photos with my iPhone. I knew that the colors would probably not show up correctly, but at least I would have the outlines of the scene to follow. I chose one of Cherry on Rio to paint. When the sun hits Rio a certain way, his reddish coat really glows. That's what I wanted to show in my painting. I always seem to have trouble with large areas of dark painting like the foreground here, which I wanted to be smoother and darker and not so muddy. If I had started out with my first wash much darker and not so wet, it would have turned out much better.

November 2014

The teacher of my watercolor class, Ron Pratt, had recently spent a few days in Colorado to film a demonstration video. He came back with a photo from a calendar that he found there, and made it the subject of our painting project. It was a very colorful fall color scene in the mountains. Here in California, where fall color scenes are not so easy to find, it is hard to believe the colors of other parts of the country. I always like painting mountains, so I made them a bit more prominent than the photo. I also followed Ron's lead in adding the river, which was was hidden by brush. Otherwise, it is pretty close to the photo. It was fun to paint with such bright colors, and I think it turned out pretty good.

After spending a couple of classes on the mountain scene, we spent a couple more weeks on a scene in the woods. I don't know where this photo came from, but to me it looks like somewhere in the eastern part of the country. The photo showed lots of fall color, but it was kind of washed-out looking, so I made up a lot of the scene to try to give it more life. Like the mountain scene, it was fun to use a lot of bright colors, which were added in a somewhat haphazard manner at the start. I usually like to follow a photo pretty closely, but with these last couple of paintings, I'm finding that I am becoming a bit more confident in using my imagination.

October 2014

I missed the second week of my painting class because we finally did our trip to the mountains that we had planned for a month or so earlier. We kept putting off the trip because our horse, Rio, got some kind of spider bite and his left front leg swelled up to more than twice its normal size, and he could barely walk. After nearly two months of vet visits and treatments, he is almost ready to ride again. We had planned to go camping, but decided to make it easy on ourselves and we stayed three nights in a cabin near Mammoth Lakes. It was kind of a short trip, but we had a great time.

When I returned to my class, the assignment was to work on a painting for a holiday card. We could choose any subject that we wanted. Maureen suggested that I use one of our photos from a trip to the snow with the kids a couple of years ago. I found one with lots of people having fun in the snow, and found it fairly easy to paint. People in my class saw what I was doing and commented on how hard it looked. But really, much of the area is just white paper with a few blue shadows and the people are too small to do much detail.

The following week, my class was still working on the holiday card, but I had finished my snow scene, so I brought several photos from our recent trip. I chose to try one of a rocky mountainside with some colorful aspens. This was in Little Lakes Valley, a short hike from the Mosquito Flat Trailhead at the end of the Rock Creek Road. This is just about the best place in the Sierra to see timberline country without much hiking, because the trailhead is over 10,000 ft. elevation. Late in September, the aspens were turning yellow and red here, but still green at lower elevations. I took the liberty of adding a little stream in the meadow, but in this drought year, it was all dry.

After finishing the painting with the aspens, I had another photo that I wanted to try to paint. This was also in Little Lakes Valley, a lake with lots of sparkly sun reflections. I thought it would be a fun challenge to see what I could do with the sparkles. I started out using a dry brush technique on the water, which gave me some of the effect that I wanted, but it was really messy and I almost gave up and trashed the painting. But then I decided that I may as well keep trying to make something of it. A bit of touch up with opaque white helped a lot, although I still see it as pretty messy. But overall, I like it pretty well. I think if I were to do it again, I would try using masking fluid for the sparkles. Maybe I'll do that one of these days.

September 2014

A week or so ago, I went hiking in Sunol Regional Park. I saw lots of nice scenery but not too much that inspired me to paint it. But as I was walking along, something drew my eye to this grouping of oaks on a dry hillside. Years ago, I would have just let it go by, thinking that it wasn't worth wasting film on, but now when something catches my eye, I can just pull our my iphone and snap a photo. I thought it would be just another throw-away shot, but when I looked at my photos later, this one was the only one of many that I thought I would like to paint. Something about the arrangement of the trees and the shadows spreading down from the center said something to me. Something that couldn't be put in words. The red poison oak on the left adds something too. It is pretty loose and quickly done, but I like it a lot.

My painting class started up again a couple of days ago, and I needed something to work on in class. I remembered that I had a shot of a little cottontail bunny that I shot on our trip this summer. I also had another photo of the distant view from the same spot as the bunny, and I thought I could combine the two. This was on highway 40 at the Utah-Colorado border just south of Dinosaur National Monument. I hoped it would show the difference in scale between the bunny's world of rocks and grass, and the wide open spaces of plains and mountains. Instead, is seems to bring them together, which maybe is what I had in mind anyway. Maureen thinks the bunny looks too big. That's probably the result of combining a close-up shot with a distant view. I suppose I could have done better with the perspective. It's another quickly done painting, but I like it.

August 2014

I've been trying to keep going with my painting to keep from losing some of what little skill I have. It seems that the more often I paint, the more sure my brush strokes and the better my paintings. If I neglect it for very long, when I start again, I feel a lot less sure of what I am doing. In that way it is kind of like playing the guitar or any musical instrument. Regular practice makes it better.

A few weeks ago, Maureen and I spent a Sunday with our son, Aaron, his wife, Alicia, and our three-year-old grandson, Dylan. We took the ferry from Alameda to San Francisco and wandered around Fisherman's Wharf. We had a great time, and on the way back home, the ferry made a stop at Angel Island. On the way back, we had a nice view of the Golden Gate with the fog bank just beyond it, and a sailboat floating by. I thought it would make a good scene for a painting, so I shot it with my iPhone. I included the heads of a couple of passengers to show that the wind was a major part of the scene.

I decided to try another scene from our visit with my cousin John and his wife Pat in Colorado. This is the view from the front of their house. Actually, it is put together from several photos, but it is not too far from reality. They have such a beautiful place that wherever you look you see something like this.

July 2014

This summer I haven't been as productive with my painting as I could have been. I guess I need my weekly class to keep me going. Maureen and I went on a great trip to Utah and Colorado in early July, and I brought home lots of photos that I hoped to turn into paintings. But for some reason, I've been reluctant to get started. It may be that some of the places we saw were just so beautiful that I'm afraid that my art will fall far short of showing them as they are. I know that I should just keep telling myself that it doesn't matter, that painting anything is better than not painting at all.

 I have managed to do a couple of paintings, however. For this first one, I thought that maybe if I tried something that was not from our trip, I could get myself started. In my last blog post, I showed one of a group of riders crossing a creek. There was another photo from that same ride in Big Basin State Park that I had wanted to paint, so that's what I chose to do. This is West Waddell Creek, just below Berry Creek Falls. I wanted to see what I could do with the lush greenness and the reflections in the water, and I think I did pretty well.

This morning, I finally tried one from our trip. We stayed several days with my cousin, John, and his wife, Pat, at their place in the mountains near Boulder. Late one afternoon, I spent some time just wandering around taking pictures that I thought might become paintings. This one was of their driveway with a puddle from a recent rainstorm. Yes, they actually have rain in the summertime there, something that made us Californians quite envious. I don't usually do so much with clouds, but I thought it was worth a try. The painting was fairly quickly done, and is rather sketchy, but I think I caught some of the beauty of the place.