Merry Christmas 2015!

12" x 12" Oil on Canvas Panel

Last week Santa Claus modeled for us at  Casey Childs studio! For this oil sketch I used a three color palette: cadmium yellow, cadmium red, and ivory black, plus titanium white.

It was fun in spite of the challenges. I set up at a spot that had flat lighting and no shape-defining shadows. I absolutely love drawing and painting faces, but so little of the jolly guy's face was visible. The portrait is dominated by a shapeless red suit and a mile-long polyester beard. But maybe that's not important because, after all, I got to paint Santa!

Besides that, there was lots of cookies and chocolate for us to enjoy during breaks!

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Here's a Christmas Video I enjoyed on YouTube. If you haven't had a chance to see it, here's your opportunity:

Merry Christmas everyone!

Portrait Sketch from Life in Oil Paint

10" x 8" Oil on Canvas Panel

It's been a long time since I last got the oil paints out at a live portrait session. I've only painted portraits from life in oils a few times before. It's easier to stick with mediums I'm more familiar with for portraits, such as pastel or charcoal. But Casey Childs has cajoled me on a few occasions to practice painting from life with oil paints. Last week I finally hauled a paintbox with oil paints into Casey's studio and did the oil sketch shown above. It was made with a limited palette; cadmium yellow, cadmium red, and ivory black, plus titanium white.

Don't forget that you can see several of my plein air landscape paintings for sale in galleries throughout the state. You can find out more about them here.

Holiday Exhibits 2015

Evergreen Gallery in Salt Lake City has used a generous part of their wall space to show fourteen plein air paintings I've done. The photograph shown above and the one shown below are different angles of the wall that Evergreen Gallery is using to exhibit my work. All paintings are for sale.

Logan Fine Art Gallery in Logan, Utah and Juniper Sky Fine Art Gallery in Ivins, Utah (near St. George) also have for sale paintings I've made. If you're in any of these areas be sure to stop and visit the gallery, enjoy the exhibits and maybe you'll find something to brighten up the walls of your home - for the holidays and year round!

Cemetery Statuary

12" x 9" Oil on Panel

This is a painting I made at a local cemetery in October. The plan was to use it for a Halloween post on this blog but that didn't happen. Maybe it just wasn't Halloweeny enough, but I think it's worth a spot on this blog. 

Besides being an experience painting something I haven't before, in a place I haven't painted before, this was also another practice using only three colors. This time those colors were cadmium lemon yellow, cadmium red, and ivory black, plus white.

The Day's Palette

I started by toning the panel gray and wiping out the light areas of the statue. Those areas were kept basic and kind of rough at this point. The focus was on keeping general shapes in correct proportion to each other. Details would come later.

Then I worked on building up the dark tones. 

As you can see in the previous two photos, the background is bright behind the statue. I wanted that dark evergreen on the right to be behind the statue in the painting. That would make the lighter statue stand out more, but I wanted the angle of the statue from this viewpoint. So - I moved the tree!

The last image shows some more progress on the painting.

The finished painting is shown at the top of this post.

This was a fun opportunity to paint something different. It was kind of a combination of plein air painting with figure painting. Hope you enjoy seeing the painting and the process!