Beaches or a Dip Back in Time

Beaches

16 x 20 inches

Acrylic paints on gallery wrapped canvas

This painting is a hat tip to the “good ole' summer time”......with the emphasis on the “old”. I found a lovely old sepia coloured family photo showing this neat seashore scene. The figures were blurred but did show turn of the last century swimsuits......for the men what looks like a long t-shirt and knee shorts. The women......a knee length pair of “bloomers” over stockings covered over with a knee length dress and perched on their heads a “shower cap” swimming cap. And a lot of this is made of a wool (?) blend of fabrics......in the summer.....in the water.

I started out by roller brushing on the blue sky and bluer still water. I'd masked off the figures to reserve the white and their outlines. I added in the water line in the sand.

You can see the sepia toned photo I was working from in the upper left of the pic. The outline drawings directly above the painting is pen on clear acetate. I often use this to check where I have located my figures, when the paint is still wet.

I established the main two figures to get a “read” on how they should look. You can see the reserved white outlines of the other figures. I just begun to model the sand and waves breaking on the shore.

I carried on with fleshing out the other figures, and had a great time doing the waves coming in, the splashing of the children, and the wave-lets coming to shore on the sandy beach.

Street Festival or a Study in Light and Shadow

Street Festival

24 x 35 inches gallery wrapped canvas

Acrylic paints

My own primary source photo

This is a bitty blog post about a really BIG (for me anyway) painting. I decided I wanted to do a city scape painting with dramatic shadows and this old photo I had,fit the bill. I did some judicious rearranging of a few of the elements to get the “look” I wanted and began painting.

I first laid in big blocks of flat colour using a lotta really dark red for the shadowed side of the building. I used a T square to reddi-up the white window frames and doors.

After laying in the shadowed windows, I went over with a roller brush, the really dark shadows of the building with a muted brick red. I wanted the brick texture without details. This was going to be glazed over in the final steps of the painting.

To establish the lightest lights of the painting I turned to the background buildings which were in direct sunlight. I painted in just enough of the buildings details to establish the 3D-ness of the buildings....but not much else.

Towards the end of the painting I experimented with a lighter tone for the foreground pavement. It looked “OK”......but I'd lost the drama! So as I finished up the crowd under the blue awning and the foreground people.....I quickly switched back to a really dark foreground pavement colour, and got back my “POP”!

I finished things off with multiple dark glazes in the deeply shadowed areas with a few bright and light colour highlights, like the red tent and the toddler's balloon as he rides on his daddy's shoulders.