Toad Painted Toad

Tom Petty's "Wildflowers" doesn't get nearly the recognition it should. That is all.

really loving "World of Goo."

This is just a simple painting, done literally, to cleanse the palate. I had just finished a difficult painting for a friend, at her request and it had taken quite a lot of time and effort to get it to a point I was happy with.

Once finished, I had several colors left on my palate and I had no idea what to do with them, so I just started applying them to the canvas. Once I had the idea that there were trees at the bottom, I started working with the idea that there was a fire in progress. Maybe.

On the other hand, my wife says she thinks it's just a nice autumn day, but either way she likes it. Which is improvement of a sort I think.

Sometimes quick and easy seems to be anything but. This painting, for example.

I had wanted to paint something my wife would like. Let me clarify: my wife likes my art. Especially when I draw little cartoons and make comics for her. She doesn't really care for my paintings though and I have never really managed to do one that she thought was more than just nice. And by nice, I mean, she might think it's good but just isn't her taste at all. And we have wildly different tastes in art: I like pop-art, with bright colors and odd angles and fragments of things. She likes soft, pretty art - landscapes and scenery and realistic visions.

This painting was an attempt to create something she would like without going outside the boundaries of what I enjoy painting. A compromise, if you will.

After all, isn't that how marriage works? Compromise?

Anyway. The painting started life as a photograph taken by someone whose photo was included in a backgrounds package I got with an old computer. I would credit it if I could, but it was a stock image without any accreditation built in; I had never painted a sunset, for all that they are one of the most visible and cliched images out there and decided that the time had come for me to try my hand at one.

Things started well. I laid down a thin line of each of the colors and then used a small brush to begin to blend them together, taking time and care to clean the brush between color sets so that red blended only to orange and orange blended only to yellow and so on. I gave the background a day or so to dry before laying on the black (actually all the leftover color blended together).

This particular canvas is on the small side, about five by seven inches and I was holding it in my left hand while I applied color with my right. I'm not sure what happened, or why, but I dropped it. Face down.

I was able to salvage most of the background but the palm tree had become unrecognizable. I wiped it and most of the surrounding background paint off and gave it a day or three to dry out.

Once dry, I used a small brush coated in paint thinned to loosen the dried background colors, and then another brush to drag the remaining colors to the left. When that was dry I applied a second layer of background color and eventually was able to replace the palm tree and city scape as well.

Unfortunately, the blending did not take as well the second time around, possibly because of the paint thinner I had had to use, possibly because I was too irritated to concentrate properly.

In the end, I do like the final image, and, more importantly, so does my wife. While I do think it is a cliched image, I learned a bit more about blending and layering, which, really, is the point behind all of this, so I'm calling it successful.

As for the next painting, I've already got an idea in mind, and I know, already, that my wife is going to hate it.

This entry is cross-posted to Smiley's Tropical Escape.

Labels: art, paint, palm, sunset

Here, at long last, is the latest painting, titled "Summer".

I'm pretty pleased with the way this one came out. It very closely resembles the image I had in my head, with a few improvements that occurred as I was painting.

I had had the figure sketched for quite some time, but I was not sure what to do with the background or with the water. Nor was I sure how to best go about getting the very flat, almost cartoonish look of the final painting.

In the end, using tape to seperate colors came to my aid once again, as it gave me the methodology for painting in the background, while experimentation with gauche acrylics and heavy-body white combinations provided the colors and thickness I needed for the flat look.

The one thing that I was vaguely unhappy with at the end was the inconsistency of the black line around the figure, but I finally decided that it was as good as I was capable of making it and that if I had wanted perfection I should have used a computer in the first place. Once again, the old saw holds true - paintings are never finished, only abandoned.

The major struggle with this painting, and one that each viewer will have to decide on their own how successful I was, was to make it sexy without being sleazy. Several shades and applications of paint were put down before deciding on a combination that I felt was sexy but not too sexy.

All in all, I quite like this one, and I finally feel satisfied with the flat, cartoon look that I've been aiming for. While I have several more ideas for paintings in a similar style, I may try a few other things first, just for variety and because, well, trying new things is the whole point of this hobby.

Labels: acrylic, art, paint, season, summer

I’m not entirely happy with the final color choices, although, like always, it looks a lot better in person. The gold tracing looked really good in my head, just not so good on the canvas. Still, overall, I’m pretty happy with it.

I started with the sky, mixing orange, yellow, red, crimson and a little bit of titanium white. I then layered in the ocean and the mountain / volcano.

The end result is not entirely what I wanted. On the other hand, since I started with no real idea of what to paint, I guess I can't complain too much.

This was done on an A3 canvas with oils, in about two hours.

After the last painting, I wanted to do something easy and quick and I wanted to try out that masking technique again.

So, I took an old canvas that had been mostly covered with Lamp Black and then abandoned after the original idea didn't work out, and started laying tape out in lines until I came up with this design.

I thought this one would be fairly simple and be easy to spot, but my wife took one look and said, with complete certainty, that I had painted the Luxor, in Las Vegas. When I explained that it was actually a volcano, she asked if I was sure. Again.

I'm not sure abstracts are my forte. But it was fun and quick and easy to do, occupying a rainy afternoon and I'm mostly pleased with it. What I don't like is that it looks like a background to me. Like I need an animation cell or something in front of it to give it some sort of story or reason for being. I may go back and add to it someday, but for now it's on the wall and out of my head.

I was quite pleased with the way the masking worked out on this one and plan at least two more paintings using the technique, also using acrylics.