Tuesday, September 14

I painted again for three hours on Monday and two hours on Tuesday.  I'm declaring it finished.  It has to dry by Saturday morning so I can enter it into the Redwood Art Association Fall Show.  In its current state, it is not my best work.  It still has too many brushstrokes where the colors are not blended the way I want them, but I learned a lot about working with transparent oils that I can now apply to the next paintings in this series -- more dahlias and then lilies.  This one will be tltled Dahlia Abstract #1.

Friday, September 10

I painted for four hours on Friday and it still wasn't finished.  I needed to add some shadows, darken some lights, and lighten some darks.  Oh well.  And I haven't yet figured out how to make the image  size consistent here.

More on the new painting.

I'm working on the painting again.  Here is the picture from today.  I've discovered that since the oils I am using are transparent, I need to paint the shadows first, then glaze over them with color.  it's amazing how much the sun being out affects my mood.  Makes all the difference in wanting to paint.

The purple stripe at the bottom and the purple shape on the right are way too bright.  I'll tone them down with glazes once the paint is dry.

New Painting

I've started a new painting.  It is going very slowly.  I'm using mostly transparent oils on a metallic gold ground and I'm having to fgture out color mixtures as I go.  It is a big painting, two by three feet, of a big Dahlia, about 12 inches in diameter but a view from the side, all swirly petals.  I'm posting pctures of it as I paint.

The first image is from July 22, the second image is from July 25.  I'll add more as I paint.