Flying a Kite

This is one of my favourites. I think the way the red kite and clothes shine out against the grey background is quite striking. A bit of artistic license was used here because most of the colours worn by the girls was pink - including a pink Disney Princess kite, but I don't think that would have worked as well!

Close ups

Here's the detail on the figures from the last painting. The larger child in the foreground was the hardest to paint for many reasons, mainly that the side of his face is showing and I wanted to do my best to get a likeness, plus there was the issue of changing his clothes from summer to winter and having no photo or reference to base it on (I did end up using my daughter's coat so I could get the right angle for the hood!) and finally it was just that he was so much closer than the other two and more detail had to be put on him.

The two background figures were lovely to paint. It's surprising how much the body language and the angle of the legs and arms are recognisable as the movements of these two children, who I know well. The dog running towards them is a nice balance to the composition, leading the eye into the distance. The colours of brown and turquoise also work well without being too in your face and eye catching.

Commissioned painting from beginning to end

Here's another series of photos showing the work in progress of a painting that was commissioned as a gift for Christmas.

I purposefully started off with a mess because, 1. it stops me getting precious about the painting; 2. it shows me where the light and shade is going to be; 3. it creates a thick undercoat for the main paint on top, so that it doesn't look thin and washy. This undercoat is acrylic, but it's going to be oils on top. Acrylic is a bit more predictable, plus it doens't absorb into the canvas like oil paints do. You know when you get cooking oil on your clothes, and there's a big smudgy, oily mess that you can't get rid of? Well that's what the back of a canvas with no undercoat looks like, and it's not nice!

This next undercoat is oils; spot the difference?! There isn't much, I admit. I suppose it looks smoother than the acrylics. Lots of low odour thinner is used here (a bit like turps but without the stink) so the oil spreads in a thinner layer.

Now it gets a bit more interesting with detail in the sea; I always start from the top down, sky then sea then sand then figures, it just makes the layering easier. The thick oil paint works well here to make some nice frothy type waves, plus the same colours are used to suggest the puddles in the foreground.

More work on the figures and sand continues; a bit more blue here, a bit more brown there; it's a balancing act. But at this point we realise there's a continuity error! The figures in the distance have thick winter coats on, but the foreground figure is in shorts and tshirt, it doesn't add up. Problem is I was working from two different photos, and this is where things can start to go wrong when you composit them together.

So we gave him a coat, and I altered the angle of his legs, and here we have the finished image. Happy days. There's a bit of shine on the photo, the canvas is quite big, one meter wide by 80cm high, so it's hard to fit it all in without some of it catching an angle of light. I'll post some close ups on the next post.

An old family relative

This was a commissioned gift from my uncle to my auntie. The man on the right is her father, he was a farmer up on the Glyn Mountain, which is near where I live, and that's his prize winning bull. The photo must have been taken around the nineteen fifties.

The undercoat of every painting I do is really just a scribbled mess, but it's very useful. It stops me getting too precious about the process. It shows where the light and dark sections are, and also creates a nice thick layer of paint for the top layer to sit on, making it nice and shiny. Acrylic paint which is too thin just looks dry and chalky.

As if by magic a finished painting emerges. I like taking photos of the painting in progress, because it's so easy to forget the stages that you have to go through to get there.

Seeing the original photo and the photo of the painting side by side I can see now that the bulls forehead is a too high, but it's easy to change that with acrylics because they dry so quickly.

I purposefully wanted a balance between sketchiness and detail, so the hands are just blobs, but making sure the planes of the face are in the right place is really important. The sketchiness of the background and his clothes acts as a nice balance for the detail in the face.