Work in progress(cont)

Finally got down to doing some more work in the studio, now that the ice and snow has gone , for good I hope,I am able to heat the studio enough to work.

Basically I am still only blocking in colour, but gradually I am painting in more detail and some of the dark shadows. I am using a fairly limited palette of:

Prussian Blue, Cadmium Red,Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White.

As the painting progresses I am thinking more and more that I will leave it as an Autumn scene, rather than Jack Frost, but who knows?

Feeding the birds

 

With the very cold spell we are going through ,it’s been ever more important to keep the feeders topped up for the local bird population.

 

                    House Sparrow. Pastel pencil on brown paper.            

Not only does this give the birds a better chance of survival, it also gives me endless hours of enjoyment watching them, and trying to sketch them. There seems to be a hierarchy amongst the House Sparrows as they queue up on a twig overlooking one of the feeders.

Jack Frost

It’s been so cold here in the last couple of weeks that I have found it almost impossible to heat the studio enough to be able to paint, hence I have not worked on my “Jack Frost” painting so have no “work in progress” to show.Finally a thaw seems to be setting in , today we are back to normal with lashing rain and high winds.

While not painting I have spent a lot of time working on my website and gazing out of the window watching the birds on my feeders.With the cold spell all over Northern Europe , here in Ireland we have had a huge influx of northern thrushes, Fieldfare and Redwing and they have appeared in numbers in gardens and on feeders, many of them half starved after their long flight.   

                       Fieldfare

I’ve been going through some of the piles of unfinished work I seem to have lying around, especially watercolours, and every now and then I come across one that appears finished but has been left for some reason.

This is one that I unearthed, its not a particularly good photo of it but hopefully you can get the idea. Its a place a few miles from me called “Roches Point”, which is at the mouth of  Cork harbour, hence the lighthouse.

del.icio.us Tags: birds,fielfare,roches point,thaw,watercolour,phil davis,ballycotton

Work in progress (cont)

At the moment all I am doing is filling in the leaf shapes without putting in any real detail. I am using a limited pallet so that I hope the painting will gel together.

 

At this stage I have begun to introduce  detail into some of the leaves and I am already wondering whether I will make this a painting in the “Jack Frost” series or will I leave it in the autumn colours. it remains to be seen.

 

Bad News & Good News

With the recession biting deeply, it wasn’t much of a surprise albeit disappointing to hear just before Christmas that a new gallery , that I had some work in, was closing down after only 6 months. They stayed open up to New Year in the hope that people would buy prints etc as last minute presents, so I was delighted to hear today that they had sold an original of mine (shown below)

I think I will have several glasses of red wine tonight to celebrate.

Work in progress

It seems like forever since I posted anything to my blog, so I thought I would start the New Year with something different for me and post a work in progress.

 

 

Just before Christmas I was shown  a series of photos, taken by an artist friend , which he called “Jack Frost” for obvious reasons. I normally work only from my own reference but was so taken by some of the photos I asked could I use some, to which he agreed.

After playing around with the crop tool for a while I ended up with several photos I am going to use to try and create a series of paintings and this is the first attempt. I am using a fairly large canvas, 102x67cm and painting with oils

 

I don’t want to copy the picture but I do want to use the orange brown leaf as a focal point. I lightly sketched some leaf shapes in, just to have some reference, but I find as I paint that these shapes are being changed over and over again

del.icio.us Tags: work in progress,Jack Frost,sketch,leaf,leaves,oil