On the Road Again

This is one of my favorite paintings I've done so far, it's fresh off the easel and the size is 20x24, oil on panel.  I did the majority of this painting with a knife as well, just like the last painting but this one is much more successful.  I have really been working on moving between soft and hard edges and describing objects in the most  basic way possible.  The mountains in the background are a good example of this.  Just a series of strokes with the knife and you have a mountain.  I love that!  I love seeing progression as well, this painting is a huge step up from the last painting I posted and they were painted a week apart.  That's a confidence booster for sure.

Winter Storm

So I've been slacking again on adding  recent work to this blog.  Forgive me!

This painting is oil on panel and is 16x20, which is a little larger than I usually

do, but  in  a lot of ways it  was easier than the smaller paintings I work on.  I 

painting almost the entire painting with a palette knife and added certain 

strokes where I felt they were needed with a brush.  I'm kind of liking the

gritty feel that the painting maintains when it is done with a knife as opposed 

to a brush.  I'm going to  continue to explore with both tools and see what  I'm

able to do.  I've titled this painting Winter Storm.  One thing you've got to love 

about  Cache Valley is the amount of barns sitting there just waiting to be

painted!

"The Undergrad"

This painting is a 3'x4' self portrait on canvas from life.  I painted it in the studio at the school in a very large mirror on the wall.  This painting took over 3 weeks to complete because I had to wait each night until the studio was completely empty to be able to have the lighting where I needed it to be.  All in all I am pretty happy with how it turned out.  I approached it differently than most paintings I do, first because of the size, second because I couldn't work the entire painting while it was still wet.  This ended up being a pretty big challenge and a lot of swear words were directed towards this painting but in the end it came together.  I liked the idea of painting myself doing a painting of myself. You learn quite a bit about yourself as when you stare in a mirror at all the details for hours and hours on end.  It was an awesome experience that I plan on repeating.

Figure Study

This one was another of my figure studies but was quite a bit bigger than the other one.  This one is about 16x20 charcoal on gray toned paper.  I really loved this pose.  The photo is a little misleading too because there is quite a bit of space above the figure that creates a nice sense of atmosphere.

This is one of many figure studies I have done over the last year.  I particularly like the foreshortened angle on this one.  I used to struggle with foreshortening but I have done it so many times now that I actually prefer to do foreshortened poses.

This was my favorite painting I did over the Summer.  It is a plein air study of Manzanita beach in Oregon.  Danielle and I went on a trip with my family and stayed in a beach house in this little cove for a week and I absolutely fell in love with the area.  This painting was done with me standing barefoot in the sand in the warm sun with the sound of the waves crashing and the smell of the sea in the air.  It was a surreal experience and probably the funnest plein air painting I've done so far and I was extremely happy with how it turned out. 




Doug, if you read this, I'm not gonna lie.  I freaking nailed the color and value in this painting.  Just putting your wisdom to use!

Golden Fields

This was another plein air study that I did at the beginning of Fall.  I really wanted to capture one of the many wheat fields when they were at there peak and looking like a field of gold.  As I was driving in to town I noticed this old barn that is out completely by itself in the middle of what looked to me like a sea of gold and I absolutely HAD to paint it.