Red Garden Roses

This is for Rookie Painter May 2012 challenge. It's oil on 10x12 canvas panel.

The bright colored roses in this reference photo (ref) made it a very appealing challenge to do. It's basically a study of different shades and values of red, for which I used mainly vermilion, cadmium red neutral, magenta, rose red, Gamblin's radiant magenta, cadmium yellow, with lemon yellow for high lights and burnt sienna and ultramarine violet for shadows.

Flowers Tablecloth Bread and Cheese

This is for Studio Atelier Apr/May 2012 still life challenge. It's oil on 10x10 canvas panel.

When I first saw this challenge (ref), I thought this was such a daunting still life challenge, with so many objects in the photo. However, I liked all the colors in the reference photos, including the tablecloth, and the arrangement was very interesting, with the colorful (flowers and table) vs. the neutrals (bread and cheese). So I decided I would give it a try.

I wanted to keep most of the elements, as I thought many of them were interesting. However, I wanted to refocus the eyes to certain objects while de-emphasizing others.  The obvious choice to focus the eyes first would be the flowers, especially the yellow dahlias. I placed less emphasis on the sunflower, the lily flower buds, and the yellow flowers behind the sunflower. I couldn't completely discard the bottle of wine and the grapes since it would make the left side of the painting too empty, so I kept them, but made them to have similar values as the background to send them to background. I dropped a couple of things from the original photo: the wine glass way on the left as I thought that added nothing to the painting, and also the grass shooting out from the vase since I thought the arrangement was already busy enough. I also skipped the background blackish fabrics as well since I thought that added nothing as well to the overall composition.

The tablecloth looked a bit scary to paint at first because of the intricate design. I painted big blocks of colors, but using the same colors that appeared elsewhere in the painting in order to tie the whole thing together: blue from the background, yellow and orange from the dahlia, red from the tomatoes.

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.