In the Corner of the Paddock

Here is a painting using a limited palette which I learned from a previous exercise. I tried for an "emerging from the shadows" feel with this one. Rendering the foreground straw was tedious but fun.

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4th of July

This one is done is my response to the Copy challenge. I wasn't thinking about copyrights or anything and just went right to one of my Andrew Wyeth books and copied one of his loose untitled watercolor studies of Karl Kuerner with a dead deer on a snowy hillside. I then realized that it might be illegal to have done this even though I am not planning on selling it. Wyeth works are not in the public domain.

Regardless, I learned a lot, especially after trying to match his color palette. He gets a lot out of just a few earthy colors with some mysterious cold grays and very subtle greens showing up here and there. When I saw these colors flowing across my paper, it was kind of magical to see the way they could suggest a lot with a little.

Then I did this painting based on some photo reference I had of a local 4th of July parade from years ago. I removed a lot of extra background stuff as I was going for that stark Wyeth quality and some of that mysterious feeling in the poses. "What are those guys doing out there in the road? Why don't they look happy?" I also forced myself to draw everything without using any of my graphic designer tricks with transfers and tracing... thinking that is what Mr. Wyeth would have done.

The video of this one should be ready soon. 

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