This painting is from a photo taken during our vacation in Scotland last fall. When i began the painting i mixed 7 different hues of green. That turned out to not be nearly enough, and so there was quite a lot more color mixing than i’d originally intended. But what a treat! Reference photo also attached. I didn’t want to emphasize the house, so kept it pretty simple, compared to the original. There are still a couple of things to fix with the hedge/grasses around the house, but i was excited to let you see my first effort of this kind of “Scottish” mist.

Painting is 9” x 12”, on 1/8” panel.

The reference photo for this painting is of a scene in Rocky Mountain National Park (Moraine Park) from an outing last February. Norma took the photo late afternoon that day. What drew me to the composition was the contrast between the colors of the willow branches and the surrounding snow. I didn’t want this to be a big project or take too long, so the painting is on a small panel (8” x 10”). The most challenging part of the work was those branches — had to go out and purchase a new Rigger brush to get some of those very thin lines. Also a lot of negative space painting, when lines started out being too thick.

Using a paint brush to create a painting has almost always my tool of choice . Every once in a while i use a palette knife to add in a few features like highlighting texture. A few weeks ago, though, my oil painting teacher suggested that we (the class) paint a scene from start to finish with a knife. Painting with a knife requires using a lot more paint than with a brush; and the resulting product is much thicker and, at least potentially, more texture-rich. It also requires learning new skills to manage and control the strokes.

the painting i’m attaching to this post is the result of that experiment. The reason it’s been sitting around for several weeks is that i was very ambivalent about presenting it in its fairly rough form. I really wanted to refine the flowers in the front of the painting; give them more detail. Also would have enjoyed adding detail, such as small rocks, pebbles, to the front part of the path. However, in order to pull that off i would have had to use a brush, and i did want to be able to present this work as a 100% knife effort —- just because. (!)