Bronze Scuplture and Two Pigeons

This is for A Day Not Wasted, April 2012 challenge. It's oil on 10x12 canvas panel.

I've never done a sculpture painting before, so I couldn't pass up this challenge (ref), especially with the nice outdoor lighting and the two pigeons! I wanted to make this painting more dramatic and to focus on the study of the sculpture, so I made the background black to contrast the bronze man bust, and used a relatively simple palette, which included mainly cerulean, cobalt teal, hooker green, ultramarine violet, Paynes grey, prussian blue, cadmium yellow and white.

Boats at Nowa Motlawa

This is for Virtual Paintout April 2012 Gdansh Poland challenge. It's oil with palette knives on 10x12 canvas panel.

This is my second submission to this month's challenge. I wanted to try something different with this painting. As I have not painted with solely palette knives before, I decided that I would give it a go. I chose this relatively straight forward boat river scene around Nowa Motlawa and Stagiewna. (ref) I had a lot of fun painting with palette knives since I had to loosen up my strokes and increase the amount of paint that I had usually used before. So I will definitely do some more palette knife paintings in the future!

Bottle Collector

This is for Virtual Paintout, April 2012, Gdansk Poland challenge. It's oil on 10x12 canvas panel.

As I was virtually traveling in Poland this month, in the city of Gdansk, at least from the part I was initially seeing, it seemed all very industrial. I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to tackle all the industrial scenes, and then I came upon this man walking his dog. (ref)

What caught my eyes was not only humor in the scene, with the dog seemingly quite content with his empty water bottle, but I also liked the orange tone of the dog versus the blue tone of water and vegetation around it, plus the bald man holding a leash. Of course there was a strong contrast in light which I'm always drawn to.

I first prepared the whole canvas with ultramarine blue as a complimentary color to the dog, whose color included the orange family such as cadmium orange, burnt sienna, mars yellow etc. The rest of the painting are part of the blue or blue green family, such as cerulean, hookers green, Paynes grey etc. Cadmium yellow and white are added for the highlights.

Tiger

This is for Studio Atelier Feb 2012 tiger challenge. It's oil on 20x30 stretched canvas.

I'm a bit late in this challenge, but I couldn't pass up a good challenge photo. As the challenge said there's no drop dead deadline, I decided to take my time to work on a bigger canvas.

I wanted the tiger look even more fierce than the reference photo (ref), so I made the tiger's head straighter and looking towards the viewer, rather than slight tilting. I dropped everything else around the tiger in the background so that the focus will just be on the tiger. I also want to make the tiger to look like as if it's ready to jump out of the painting, so I made the front part higher in contrast while the back of the tiger is a bit more grey. At the end I used a very small brush to add in whiskers and fine hair detail.

Two Kettles

This is for Rookie Painter, April 2012 challenge. It's oil on 10x10 canvas panel.

This month is back to reflective kettles. The arrangements and lighting I thought were fine, so I did not alter much to the picture this time. So I basically painted as is, keeping the table top a little bit on the violet side while contrasting with the golden tone main kettle.