Onion #5

2/1. Onion #5, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in. SOLD

I'm starting to understand more the idea of limiting the value range, at least in the way that it affects the shadow area - leaving the shadow mass soft, still anchoring the object without having to put the darkest darks there. Instead, the darkest note is in the area with the most interest. I luckily got the right colors down real fast and this turned out to be only a little more than an hour long.

Banana #4

1/31. Banana #4, oil on linen panel, 4x6 in.

I was playing around in this one, leaving out some of the shadow details. Getting myself to see things a little differently.

Potato Cairn

Potato Cairn, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

(Why have I not been capitalizing the words in my titles?...) This was a good exercise and I probably need to do something like it once in a while, but I was glad to finish it. I was up late painting it, which made it feel like it was taking much longer, but it turned out to be just under five hours including the previous night.

Potato cairn, WIP

Potato cairn stage 1 and 2, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

I allowed myself less time to paint last night, so I'm breaking up this piece into two sessions. Not having a bigger linen panel ready, I used a RayMar canvas panel that was sitting around - with the surface sanded down a little and a quick drying layer of paint scraped smooth over the canvas texture (I scraped with a palette knife, leaving paint in the little depressions).

I wanted a simpler exercise in light and dark, and a setup with potatoes seemed right. And I realized the previous night that I tend to get too wet with medium early on, so focusing on the light I thought would also slow me down and keep things dry longer. I stacked the potatoes like this because the more I thought about them the more they felt like stones, and what can you do with stones (non-violently) that is more primeval than stacking them in unnatural ways?

Little bear slippers

1/28. Little bear slippers, oil on linen panel, 5x7 in.

I've finally gone to a white background! Please "bear" with me as I adjust some other colors and possibly change my banner in the coming days.

We saw these slippers the other day at Target on sale for a couple of bucks, and our daughter loved them immediately. She barely fits in them because of all the puffy stuffing (we might have to perform some surgery on the insides) but that doesn't stop her.

Lemon and bowl

1/27. Lemon and bowl, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

I was confident in putting another element into the picture and wanted to keep it loose and quick but I really struggled here. At the start it seemed that this little Japanese dipping bowl would be the tricky thing, but it was the lemon that gave me the hardest time. I fudged with the color the whole time and with its "seat" in the bowl, just unable to make it feel like it wasn't weightless there. Maybe it was the second indirect light source throwing me off, or that I was starting to get hungry but forced myself to keep going, or it was a few too many bad songs and annoying commercials on the radio at the time. Eventually, though I lost the looseness I managed to unify some parts color-wise to get it at least in the right direction.