20140424 - Hatteras Lighthouse at Sunset

Well, today I passed another milestone in my painting "career". Isn't it an axiom that anyone that paints somehow feels compelled to paint a lighthouse? Yup. That's exactly what I did! As you can see, I decided on this beautiful day that the Hatteras Lighthouse on the NC Outerbanks would be an excellent subject.

My compliments to Dan Carmichael, who took the photograph on which this painting is based. Please note that I will NOT in anyway sell or make a profit from this rendition of his work. Instead it was intended as a teaching exercise. It's neither legal nor right to just copy the work of another and take credit and/or pay for it. In this case, since I'm only using it as a teaching exercise, it is "fair use". But all rights to the image remain with the original photographer.

While this could be better, I'm fairly pleased with this rendition. It does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original. I changed the sky to make it a little more early / late in it's feel. The scan does not do justice to the subtle shading. The sea oats don't have the glitter that is in the original painting. Capturing and maintaining the highlights in the original sea oats is beyond me at this point. I might try another pass at this painting using Hot press paper and seeing if I can reserve some of the white paper to help preserve the highlights. I also need to work on the foreground vs. background a little more. Well, it's another example of how I learn by doing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

20131013 - Planning a new painting

I'm in the process of planning a new, larger painting. I will sometimes take the effort to initially sketch it in my sketchbook to see if I like the composition. Lots of times I move components around a bit. Then I might even do a larger study of the painting.

In this case, I took the sketch and scaled it up to 12" x 9" (in portrait mode). I plan on taking this idea (of lighted advent candles) and painting it on a 14" x 11" canvas. I will make a "canvas" out of watercolor paper (as I did with the Clematis).

Part of what I wanted to learn is how to make the lighted halo around the candles and how it should fade into the background. This painting did not fully capture it, but I am not completely displeased with it. I think I know how to accomplish what I want.

The fun thing about this is that it will allow me to run some LED lights into the back of the painting and "back light" the advent candles. I suspect I will need to make a mask for behind the watercolor paper so that only those areas I want to be lit will stand out.

I have not yet decided if I want to use some calligraphy along with the candles. While that might look nice, it will be very difficult to get the mask for the calligraphy to match the front of the painting. But the effect could be pretty spectacular.

I suspect you will see this one again.