20130925 - NC Farm House Take Two!

Sometimes it takes more than one time before you get it "right". I'm not all the way "there" yet. But I am definitely learning what works for me and my own personal style of painting. This afternoon, I decided to give another shot to the North Carolina Farm House theme.

As you can see, it's not the same as the previous farm house. In fact, this is more of a run down mansion compared to many farm steads in North Carolina.

As with my previous painting, I decided to try something different with this painting. I decided to have a rain cloud off in the distance. There are great swaths of the state where .. if you can see beyond the tree line .. you can see such rain clouds. So, here we have a cloudy sky with rain in the distance. This mutes all the normal colors that I would tend to choose.

The trees are getting better. The grass is not quite so crass. And the shrubs look as if they might have Knights who say "Nee" looking for them:

By the way, here's the original photograph I used as a reference.

Oh, if you were wondering, since I use this only as a painting exercise and not to create a painting to sell, I can copy use a photograph like this.

Well, I hope you enjoy this. I definitely enjoyed working on it. But it's getting late and I need to crash for the night. Enjoy!

20130924 - NC Farm

Today's painting is of a North Carolina farm, you can tell by the red clay and the tin roof with the screened porch. It is the result of using the a teaching video and modifying the subject a little to make it a unique painting for the area where I live.

The original video was made by Mike Keal. It is a teaching video by Terry Harrison, which shows him creating an English farm landscape. I enjoy doing is watching videos of artists to take the time to help show others what you can accomplish with a watercolor painting. The advantage of using example videos is that it provides me both with techniques and a target for my own painting.

I varied the scene quite a bit. The sky is a stormy sky later in the day. You will sometimes see a yellowish / greenish sky in advance of a severe thunderstorm in this area. Such a sky is never a good one to see, since it can lead to tornadoes in the area. Oddly, you will note the Carolina blue in the sky. We often see such skies in this area .. even ahead of a severe storm.

Hopefully you will enjoy this one. This took longer than many of my paintings. There are many things I like about this one. Some that I will improve next time. One thing is that this may have been easier with a larger paint surface. This is a 9x12 inch watercolor paper block. The detail work is a bit hard at this scale.