Yellow Moon

"Yellow Moon"

12" X 16" Oil on canvas
Was wanting to try out a very pale background so I came up with this one. A simple landscape with a moonrise going on. Contrast is a bit off so the moon stands out a bit more on the actual painting. Fun little painting to do.

Farm Off 99

"Farming Corn Off 99"

12" X 16" Oil on Canvas
Saw this sight on my recent trip up north. We took Interstate 5 and at various parts of it route 99 runs parallel to it. This farm was just below Willows and pretty close to the freeway. The clouds have a lot more subtle variations of color but aren't showing up well in this pc. I think if I did a larger painting using this one as a reference I'd push the atmosphere more in the mid and foreground. My reference photo had much stronger contrast to it and I back that down some but I'd like to see it backed off even further. I also tried for a simpler version of foreground grasses too...not my usual type so I'm going to let it sit a few days and see how that looks to me then.

Grey Morning Near Lompoc

"Grey Morning Near Lompoc"

12" x 16" Oil on Canvas

I've driven many times to Lompoc which is about 30 miles from here and the closest Home Depot! I live in the center of a funny triangle...Lompoc to the West, Santa Maria to the North and Santa Barbara to the South...or, Home Depot to the West, In N Out Burger to the North and art supplies to the South. Here in Solvang we have Ace Hardware, Rite Aid and a Subway Sandwich place and that's it.
Anyway...in the Winter months I see scenes like this along the highway headed for Lompoc. Very grey days and great fading-in-the-mist eucalyptus trees. Only painters like that kind of weather. This one was done alla prima in about 3 hours tonight. A very fun painting!

Quiet Time of Day

"Quiet Time of Day"

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
This one reminds me of the light along the hills north of Santa Barbara in the early evening hours. I didn't set out to paint this one like that. I painted the sky and hillsides but got busy running errands before I could finish it. I started another larger painting but stopped on that one too for the same reason. I came back to work on the larger piece but decided to finish them up in order and came back to this little one. My original vision was gone for the painting and I ended up painting in the rest of the scene as you see here.
The reddish tint in the foreground grasses came from a walk I had with my daughter yesterday in Eaton Canyon. There was a lot of smaller plants that had this great red color to them lining a lot of the valley floor and I loved the contrast of those plant colors against the dark oak trees behind them.

$100.00

Rancho San Carlos De Jonata

"Oaks at Rancho San Carlos de Jonata"

15" X 30" Oil on Canvas
Worked on this one over the weekend. I saw this scene while being given a tour of this Ranch just north of Solvang and Buelton, CA. Luckly I have become friends with the owners of the Rancho, a wonderful couple, and they have offered to let me come to visit and paint or take pictures. I was driven through the various areas of the ranch and told of it's history which is super interesting if you like history like I do. I need to go there again for some evening shots.

Evening Light Study

"Evening Study"

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
This is a study on varying light and will serve the purpose of being my reference study for a larger painting later. I painted this last night in the prospect of adding more dramatic light to the trees. This is a small 5x7 and although I could have worked more detail into it or spent more time refining the overall look it is just a study and what I was looking for was answered already here. What I will change in the larger piece will be to include more dark shadows in the upper tree areas hit by the last light. Adding the shadows will add more volume to the tree and promote the brighter lit foliage there. The study works well and supports the idea that it is always better to work out something in your head on a smaller canvas then go larger.

$100.00

Afternoon Moment

"Afternoon Moment"

5"x7" Oil on Panel
I suppose to the eye this painting is about the foreground eucalyptus tree or the trail but it isn't. I painted this one to work on that distant mountainside. I wanted a late afternoon glow on it and I wanted it to be very distant looking...playing with the atmosphere of that part of the painting. I like the soft and very faint transition up to the sky colors.
What made the mountainside appear very distant was keeping the darker shadow colors in a lighter value. The mountain is basically a pink mix of titanium white and alizarin crimson. The shadows are the same mix with a bit of ultramarine blue added which makes it a light violet if you don't go too heavy with the blue. Looks cool.
The fun part of the tree is the last thing done to it...adding the trunk. I'm getting better at keeping the edges of the trunk loose which has taken me a while to get better at. It's working, hahaha.

$100.00

Night Colors

"Night Colors"

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
Venturing once again into painting the colors and light of the night. Night scenes are always fun to get creative...adjusting colors and letting them play off of each other. The light is probably the most fun of painting a nocturne. I like to keep certain parts very dark and then pick a spot to let the light shine through...a luminous area of the canvas to allow the viewer to "see" through the darkness. Charles Rollo Peters did just this at times on the adobe walls in his nocturnes. The rest of the painting would be shrouded in mysterious darks and pale color. We have a mission in town, Mission Santa Ynez, and Peters painted a nocturne of it. Very cool!

Meadow Trail

"Meadow Trail"

5" X 7" Oil on panel
Just a quick study I did when working on the last painting to work out the foreground grasses and plants. This was a very helpful sketch for that painting.

On The Easel

....On The Easel Aug 26, 2010....

Just finishing up on this one. It's 15" x 30" on stretched canvas. The oak tree was up in Nipomo and looked pretty stately so onto the canvas it went. I like the look of a nice old oak tree especially the larger ones and this guy fit the bill perfectly. This tree is right next to the Dana Adobe property, just south of it, so if you're ever in Nipomo go have a look at it. Now onto the next painting.....

Santa Ynez Evening Trail

"Santa Ynez Evening Trail"

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
This actually is not a new painting. This one sat next to my easel for a long time. It didn't have the eucalyptus trees painted originally, just that back row of yellow green trees and looked boring. I decided to take it back to the easel and add the eucs for a little more contrast in the overall painting. I love the trail leading into the painting and I think the added trees give the painting a little more depth as well as some stronger contrasting colors.
I like the painting much more now so I'm glad to have given this little guy time to sit while I glanced at it over and over trying to decide how to improve it. I'm happy with it at this point.

Oak Study

Oak Study

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
Just a simple little painting focusing on an oak tree. Couldn't come up with an idea to paint last night before bed. I couldn't sleep and I wanted to paint something. I had an idea for a larger painting but I needed stretcher bars for a specific frame I have. It was way to late to go out to the garage and start cutting wood though. So, I ended up painting this little study to play with colors of the oak tree. I had some nice looking colors just before this version but I played with it too much. Somewhere before you turn it into mud you have to call it quits. I ended up with this which is ok. I like having a larger canvas to do my messing around. I'd like to do more branch work and mess with shadows but at this size it gets too small for my taste. Fun little painting though.

Artist Canopy Sign

I am going to be one of the artists exhibiting in an art fair in the small town of Los Olivos this weekend. My old sign for my canopy has had it so I decided to make one since there is little time. I took a piece of stretched canvas and some stretcher bars, masked off an area on top to put my name and painted a scene borrowed from my previous painting "Evening Approach" which is posted below. The painting and top area were painted first and then the lettering painted on. While all of that dried I made a small frame out of some scrap lumber I had in the garage and cut down to size.
Here is the sign all finished up and in the frame....

Here is how the sign will look in the canopy...came out pretty nice....

I've been getting ready for this show so I haven't had much time to paint any little ones lately. Lots of framing, varnishing and general hysteria going on. Had some touch ups to do on some bigger paintings and all else that goes on with a show. I'm on the committee for this show which has also had me in several...no, countless meetings. I am glad it is finally going to happen and will be over...have to get ready for another show in September...then a Studio Tour in November.
If anyone is in Los Olivos, CA this weekend come up and see me. I'll be on the north end of town complete with cool looking canopy sign!

Painting The Evening Light

"Evening Approach"

5" x 7" Oil on Panel

SOLD
I wanted to push the evening colors in a scene and work more with distant mountain colors at sunset. This scene was created just for this purpose. I like the warmth of evening light and felt like experimenting with them in this painting. This was really an enjoyable study and I'll work more on this in the future. I like the slight color shifts in the distant mountains and feel I can work more with those too. Moving from cool colors on the right hand side of the mountains to the warmer pinkish tones on the left side was a kick. I've done this on the past but not with so much deliberate color work. I love that diffused look of the highlights there.

The new Utrecht paints are working out great and I'm having fun exploring with some color mixes that I began with the Winsor Newton paints. I bought just the basic colors that I use, Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow Pale (Light), Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White. I also bought a tube of Paynes Grey but I could have just kept using mud for that. These colors really do most of the work for me. I do switch off and on with Cerulean Blue for skies and some foliage. The less color you use the better color harmony you end up with. Try using the same colors for your color mixes and you won't end up with some really stark color that stands out above all the others....unless you are trying for that.
Fun little painting.

The one paint in this one that I don't normally use was orange. I mix my own but on this one I grabbed an old tube of Shiva Cadmium Orange. That tube has been with me since college back in the early 80's....let's see...I bought that tube when "Cheers" was still in prime time, when Duran Duran was still in the top 40, when there was no Back To The Future 2 or 3...that's how long ago that Shiva paint was bought by me and it is still in great shape. I like Shiva paint. I think now they mainly create Gouache. As you can see the orange was used to promote the evening light on the trees and it worked very well.

Eucalyptus Study 2

"Eucalyptus Study 2"

5" X 7" Oil on Panel
I finished up another painting late last night and cropped part of the base of a tree as a detail image. As I looked at it I thought it would make a good painting focusing on just the base of a eucalytpus tree. I grabbed another panel and did this painting in about an hour. I wish I could paint these little ones faster. Sometimes they go pretty quick but other times, the majority of times, I spend way too much time doing these...almost as long as a 9x12 painting. I like the trunk here and that was why I painted this one. Thes euc trunks can be white, cream, red, pink...it all depends on the light of day. Overall it was a very fun painting.

$100.00