October Sunset

Driving home last night, I was struck by how yellow the sky was, in contrast to the dark trees. So I decided to paint what I remember seeing. (Didn’t bother with taking a photo with my phone, even though I was the passenger.)

Pumpkin Harvest.. Work in Progress

It’s finally starting to feel like fall here after a long, hot summer. So, I’m in the mood for fall-themed paintings. This one is from a lesson for patrons of PaintCoach. The idea is to map out the large shapes first, and get the values set before filling in the detail.

I’m doing this on an 8×8 canvas, which I painted with Winsor & Newton Galeria in Pale Umber, drawing out the lines with an acrylic paint pen. (Some of the lines are “wrong”, but I’ll be painting over them anyway.)

Sunflower 10: Playing with Yellows

Some time back I had painted this 6×6 canvas panel with cerulean blue, so today I used that for my sunflower. The petals are layered with cadmium-free orange as the base (although it looks like yellow ochre now that it’s painted on the blue). Then I mixed azo yellow with some yellow ochre. Finally, the top layer is cadmium-free yellow. The center is burnt umber light, with some yellow ochre, and then purple and yellow denoting the seeds.

Abstract: “New Mexico”

I haven’t painted (or drawn) for weeks, so today I was just playing with paint without any ideas in my head of what to paint. But after the red oxide paint dried, I rotated the 8×8 canvas, and it suddenly seemed to me like the Sangre de Christo mountains in New Mexico. To that end, I added the chromium green, the yellow “road” and the white dots (lights in houses along the road?)