This posting is about the painting i’ve been working on in my Monday class for the past few weeks.  It’s from a photo Norma took while on her adventure in the Lofoten Islands this past July. You can see the reference photo below  (it will be tothe right of my painting photo — obviously!).

So i used a 9″ x 12″ canvas.  Would much preferred to use much larger one, but as i think i’ve mentioned before, this teacher wants me to use small ones.  I changed the composition just a little.  As of last week teacher declared the work finished.  I didn’t argue, but it certainly does not look at all finished.  So i will continue to work on it at home.  The paint layers are too thin; the fence posts never made it in to the painting; (i had painted over them and then forgot about them!) and the colors, except for the sky and clouds, are not very pleasing to me.  that said, i am pleased with the overall shapes and the color contrasts.  I’ll see what i can do to make the overall painting more vibrant!

 

Well, i just looked at the date of my last posting and realized that it’s been a while — though in between this posting and the one on October 1st i did post something on the blog of judy A site.

Anyhow, what with one thing and another i’ve gotten behind in posting.  So — with the red boat house painting i’ve worked over the past couple of weeks mainly on the mountains and the boat.  Boat has now been repainted several times while i tried to get the shape, size and reflections to work.  It’s improved but i’m not crazy about the color of the boat itself.  For the mountains,  I’ve focused primarily on getting 3-dimensional feel to them.  The one which gave me the most trouble was the green one –  towards the mid-to-right side of the painting.  It’s come along, i think, and i’m not sure how much more i’ll tweak it.  today i spent a little time revisiting the boat house itself.  It needs some fixing up but i think i have a pretty good idea how to go about it. 

The red boat house — this week i decided to do some work on the boat and the mountains.  I ended up repainting the boat 3 times and am getting ready to do #4.  I was trying to fix the shape and the color.  Not there yet.  When i first started the painting, i did a very thin layer of paint over the whole canvas, as part of an initial values study.  Hadn’t touched the mountains since.  So i went back and started working on those mountains, beginning on the left side of the canvas.  Teacher had some helpful hints in class yesterday about ways to make the mountains look more 3-dimensional.  Tonight I did some work on lower part of the sky.