Winter in Austria

The Jan 2008 Invitation to Paint on Wet Canvas involved some excellent snow scenes of Graz, Austria. This is composed using the foreground of one, the background from another and an image of some kids playing in the snow. The closer figure looks as if he is doing the hokey cokey!

This will be the last post for a while as we are off to New Zealand for 3 weeks on Saturday. Hopefully, there will some paintings to post when I return.

Mount Cook

This was completed today and based on the palette used in #4 in the Colours of Winter series.

It measures approx 32 cms by 22 cms on Bockingford paper. I am pleased with the feeling of distance but hate the hard line in those graduated washes. I may try and fix those.

Colours of Winter

I've been very naughty and failed to keep this blog up to date.

The assignment over the Christmas/New Year break was "Have a look at how artists use colour in winter scenes, from old and modern artists, particularly Monet. Do your own observations of wintry visual matter and make your own studies or piece of work."

Here I have painted the same scene in different palettes. #1 is how I would have approached this. #2 and #3 are after looking at several of Monet's paintings, particularly his studies of haystacks in different lights and in different seasons. #4 is influenced by a painting by Diana Moses Botkin I found on the Internet.

The general view is that #3 and #4 are best. The next stage is to paint a different scene using one of the selected palettes.

Smoke and Steam

This is the image that I messed up in a big way in class, when experimenting with altering the surface of the support by adding tissue paper etc.. It really deserved to be painted better - so here it is.

The smoke should not have a hard edge like that, and the lighting is a little too subdued, but the composition and perspective work really well - IMHO.

Tess

The brief was to take a photograph and incorporate it in a still life. A photocopy of the photograph was then to be stuck on the paper and the rest of the still life painted around it. This was started in last weeks homework and finished off during class last week and homework this week.

I was very worried about the bottom left of the composition, but working on the texture and folds of the cloth, seem to have solved the "gap".

Half sheet of Arches in St Petersburg White Nights paints.

One of my better pieces this term - I think!

Springhouse

The work from class last Wednesday was terrible. Using tissue paper and newspaper to change the painting surface. More like Blue Peter, and I was very bad at it.

To cheer myself up, this was painted in response to the reference photograph in the December Invitation to Paint on Wet Canvas. More my style, and as Jean would say "a proper picture".

The Drummers

This is finally finished. After all the preparation, it was very difficult to complete. The background worried me, and some useful advice was obtained from The Watercolour Studio on Wet Canvas. Maybe it was all because this was the first time I have painted on expensive paper - a half sheet of Arches Aquarelle - and I was afraid of wasting it. But don't the colours sing?

It has been well received at WC, let's hope it goes down well at college tomorrow.