It's Here: The Video, A Painting A Day

They are here. A painting a day, small paintings for big results DVD. Learn about canvas, colors, palettes and brushes. Some techniques to make working on small paintings easier. You can follow me as I paint three miniature oil paintings in less than two hours.

In the DVD I take you through an actual painting session, working on three paintings simultaneously. Only 24.95 plus 2.95 shipping.

Children on the Beach

Here is the completed painting, On the Beach, 24 x 30 oil on canvas

You can see the earlier stages of this painting on the 1hundredpaintings blog

I worked from a photograph the children's mother took a number of years ago. Capturing the late afternoon/early evening light was my goal here. Of course being able to recognize the children is the foremost requirement. Nearly twenty years ago I was lucky enough to be able to study color theory (actually color practice, color theory usually falls apart when you start putting paint on the canvas) with an artist who studied with a student of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, on of the greatest painters at capturing color and light. His work is well worth study.

Below are details from the painting.

Black and White Painting in Color

Today's painting, a horse head, was referenced from a black and white photo. But I can't paint in just black and white, I need color. Starting with a red ground ( artspeak for background ) on my canvas, I laid in the basic dark dark shapes. A few of the not so dark darks and then I jumped to the lights. Not straight white, a bit of orange and ochre to warm it up.

When painting in public, you get to talk to fellow artists of varying skill levels. I talk to quite a few who work in pencil or charcoal but are reluctant to paint or who have tried painting and were unhappy with the results. Let me use this painting to illustrate a couple of helpful ideas.

First, if you draw exclusively in black and white, be it pencil or charcoal or whatever. Make it easy for yourself and try working with only black and white paint. You already know how to discern tthe values ( darks and lights ) and to see the shapes, so just work with learning how the paint works. How it feels going on the canvas. How to thin. How it covers and how it blends. Play with that.

A second step is to work on a colored ground. You can use charcoal and white chalk or pastel on a blue or tan paper. Here is where it gets interesting. The white black and the ground color can be used to create cool and warm colors. Using a warm colored, say a tan paper or background you can use the black and white chalks with the tan showing through to create a range of warm tones. Now if you take your black and white and mix a range of grays without allowing the background color to show, they will have a cool, bluish cast compared to the color of your background.

Try creating two value scales (a row of ten squares going from black to white) side by side, one with the black and white mixed opaquely, the other with the colored ground showing through (work from your ground color adding white as you get lighter and using the ground color and black to create your darks. Do not mix black and white together in this scale)

In the painting below, white mixed with orange, ochre and red are used in the lights. The darks range from a deep mixture of blue and brown, to greenish midtones to bluish halftones and both warm and cool reflected light. A lot of fun, playing with a black and white image. If you find this interesting, I will be teaching a workshop in August. See below for more..

8 x 8 Oil on Canvas
$240. Shipping included

The workshop will be in Raleigh NC at Jerrys Artarama on August 14, from 10 - 4.
For more go to Jerrys Raleigh store.

More Small paintings

A summer's Sunday evening in Middleburg Va. The town has quieted down but the sun is still bright and high in the sky. This is a view down Washington St. I am always amazed that by painting this shape in one color and adding another color blog there you end up with a painting of a scene.

Of course, all that throwing of color on the canvas has work and time behind it. Working with the same colors on the palette for years will enable you to mix colors almost unconsciously.
And we have to learn how to translate the incredible range of values (light and dark) of the world around us into that narrow band we can create on canvas. How do you create the luminosity of an awning glowing from the sun behind it with just paint? How do you paint a black wall in the sunlight?

When painting is going well, and here I am using "painting" to refer to the action of painting, not the object on the easel, I seem to be holding a running conversation with myself, or more accurately, I find that a part of me is telling me what to do next, "Mix a bit of cadmium orange into that blue. Make that shape darker in value towards the bottom. Bring that line over to the left..." All that practice and lessons learned come back as they are needed. Then at some point I will look at the painting and think to myself, "Wow, did I do that?"

To me, this is one of those paintings.

Middleburg Afternoon
4 x 6 Oil on Canvas
$100. shipping included

Of course, it isn't always this way. Sometimes I look at my subject, at the canvas and the palette saying to myself, "How the heck am I supposed to do that?" or "What am I supposed to do now?" A painting will often go through a stage that an artist friend call "the uglies." So persevere and you can bring it on through.