Wind Blown survivor tree

This is an oil sketch not an original design but, its a practice piece of a wind blown survivor tree.  I may make some adjustments on it but it is a good exercise and something I need to do more of in the coming days.

Atmospheric Perspective part 2

I have been doing a lot of drawing but not enough painting.  I have taken some art classes and I have not been satisfied with the results so I have decided to paint more.  This is an initial lay in of the colors for a mountain scene.  It has the basic depth but will need some additional work in the ridge lines and I plan to work the rock cliffs with detail and closer trees which will have more than blue for color.  Stay tuned to see the improvements as they come in the coming weeks.

Atmospheric Perspective

This is a small Atmospheric Perspective oil painting in red.  Colors get cooler and lighter as they progress away from your view, so I decided to play with this in red ridge lines and mountains back to the sky.

Sand Mountain, Steamboat Springs, Colorado - Oil Study

This is an Oil Painting of Sand Mountain from Steamboat Lake, Colorado.  The reflection is in the lake and this is the view from the campground.  This is a preliminary study for a larger paining.  I try to work out the problems at the smaller size before trying to do a painting in a large size.  The smaller format takes less time an is effective for working out problems.  If you cannot get it to work small, large will be a disaster.

Practice is the basics

Part of learning art is studying the basics an understanding design.  Part of this is understanding values, i.e. the lightness and darkness of things as compared to each other.  The removal of color makes it easier to understand value.  Sometimes painting in black and white or using photoshop to switch a color photo over to B&W makes it easier to understand the relationship between things.  The top ball and cube are also a study in the "key" or the range of dark to light.  The bottom cubes are the basic types of value relationships in a painting, with the basic variations in light to dark backgrounds and the different groupings of the boxes in the different values of dark to light.  These are just a way to make one analyze the subject before beginning to paint.  These studies are highlighted in Andrew Loomis's book, Creative Illustration, which is a classic on the subject.

Sailing Barque Sketch

This is a sketch of a Sailing Barque ship.  It also is a study of calm water reflection of the sails.  More artwork to calm myself and distract myself for the daily grind.

Bushes and scrub tree

I used a carpenter's pencil to ge the thick strokes on both of these sets of sketches.  Both are opposites the top is dark on light sky and the bottom is dark sky with light foliage.