My attempt at an Holiday themed oil painting.

Each morning between 5:30 and 6:00am my 14 year old son gets up to have a shower, being a light sleeper, any noise wakes me and there is no getting back to sleep. So, I often sit in the living room sketching while the sun rises. This morning I used the toy sheep I purchased as a holiday decoration for a model. He is very round and quite solemn. The perfect subject for a quiet morning.

It's raining, a great day to paint!

It's raining so hard this morning my daughter will need a ride to school. My son is old enough to ride the high school bus to Japanese language class this year so he has his way out of the wet. Believe it or not even though we live in Seattle hard rains do not happen all that often. When my kids are parents they can tell their kids they walked ten (one) miles in the driving(drizzling) rain to school.

I love the rain. There is something wonderful about being inside working away will the rain taps it's rhythm against the window. When January comes I am ready to see the sun again, which won't happen until April, possibly May.

Tara asked what kind of drawing warm up I could suggest. Very similar to the painting actually. Start with a simple still life set up and limit time and attention to detail. Allow five minutes per sketch and do two or three. In order to achieve the broad strokes I suggest working in charcoal, the large sticks. Ignore any surface texture or detail and concentrate on the form and value. A single light source is the best way to get bold shadows.

My friend Tara asked to see some of these warm up images I do with my oil painting students and explain a little about the process. The goal with these is to concentrate on defining the objects mass, finding the full range of values and ignoring detail. You want to work quickly in order to train your eye to see the major shapes and light and dark relationships. In class we set up a very simple still life then each student has about twenty minutes and a limited palette of three colors to complete their study. This purple pepper (I don't think they really come in this color, but boy is it fun!) was painted by first staining the canvas with some quinacridone magenta and ultramarine blue and possibly a little burnt sienna. I paint a turp thinned layer down and rub off the excess paint with a rag or paper towel. Then I come back in with the darkest dark defining the objects shape and laying in the shadows. Next come the mid value color which is later wiped out to create the light areas.

The equivalent in water color would be to work wet in wet using non-staining colors so lifting could be achieved and because it's watercolor you'll be working light to dark.

We have frost on the ground this morning and an incredible crescent moon. I wish for snow every morning, but seeing as we live in Seattle the likelihood is slim, at least until January.

As usual I woke this morning wondering how to accomplish everything I have on my list. First and foremost is to get into the studio. It seems this never gets any easier; family, jobs, housework all demand attention, rightfully so. But I'm just not the best person I can be unless I've done some creating each day.

This is a portrait I recently painted of my daughter. Thank goodness for her patience and good humor, she must of heard "Hold still please" a million times.

I work from life and mostly in the direct method using oils. I'm in the process of learning more about the indirect method used by artists like Vermeer. This entails painting an underpainting using a very limited palette and concentrating on getting a high key value composition down first, then following with layers of glazes.

Good Morning

Here we go. A friend asked that I attempt to create my own blog. So here is the result.

It is early in the morning in Seattle, it rainded last night so the sky is clear and the air crisp. A good day to get things done. I hope.