I’m a beginner painter too, I like reading up on techniques and other skills but don’t paint enough to develop any. I haven’t painted in a few years. Here is one of my last ones
No one ever sees the deer :)
That’s fantastic! I see the deer, it looks great. I love the way your rocks turned out, and the reflections/water look incredible.
Thanks. Painting is a good way to loose yourself for hours but for me I have a hard time dedicating the time. I also have a hard time figuring out what I want to paint, you have to be inspired, I have sat in front of blank canvas for 15 minutes and said fuck it :)
I do have a few basic rules I follow. Don’t overwork the paint, this one I am terrible at. Water is just reflection of everything else, it really isn’t blue. Things in the distance loose colour and detail. I’m trying to incorporate a light source and paint shadows/highlighted areas. Color mixing is a science in itself, picking a palette and learning how they interact. Laugh at yourself when something goes horribly wrong. There’s probably more but I’m rusty.
I watched a lot of Jerry Yarnell on TV and have a few of his books. It really taught me how a painting is constructed. When I retire in a few years I hope painting will return as one of my hobbies.
Yeah, those are great tips - stuff I’ve read, forgotten, hear again, and continue to forget. LOL. You seem very talented, so I hope you keep at it! I hope I can put something that nice together some day!
One thing I have trouble with is I am a logical thinker. I want to paint a tree, you paint a trunk, put paint branches and then you add leaves, then you got a tree. It really doesn’t work that way, everything is abstract. In your last painting I really liked the top left quarter where you have many different “leaves” of different colours and depths, there are shadows and hints of trunks. You also have the river to draw your eye into the painting, all good stuff !! I do wonder where the river goes next :)
My latest has arrived, this one went smoothly in a lot of ways (not all ways - for some reason the paint kept coming up and leaving canvas behind, even though I put two coats of gesso on first - only with the blue though, maybe a bad mix or something - but of course, I used a LOT of blue for this one). I ended up repainting big sections of it, but some of it I was happy with right away and a lot of it went better than I had thought it would, and I picked up on a few techniques I’d stumbled onto before and tried again here with good results once more, so I think it’s a painting that helps reinforce how I use a brush and how to make something look better with details. Anyway, I didn’t expect to finish this so fast, these little 12x12 paintings go quick! So I’ll try to do another one this weekend after all.
Painting 12:
To be flippant, the upstairs hallway, stairs and living room. The teacher wife who is suddenly home all day has decided this is a great time for us (me) to get some house painting done.
@Scotch_Lufkin and @TundraToad, I’m very impressed with your “amateur” efforts.
I like it !! I think it’s your most consistent yet. Other ones I liked parts but this one the whole thing works.
Thanks man!
Good perspective effect!
Oh man, that looks lovely and so alive! I love all the colours, textures and shapes. Reminds me a little of Kandinsky’s work!
That looks like it was a ton of fun to paint! Very cool. So much character!
I finished another one, but I was a lot happier like half-way into it. At one point it really looked great, just green plains and a bright sun with a sky I was really pleased with. Then I kept tinkering with it and added stuff, and that didn’t go so well at first. My new fan brushes arrived so I’m actually a lot happier with the field of wild flowers now than I was before, the fan brushes are awesome and I can’t wait to use them from start to finish in something, but the damage was done with that tree. I did add some more detail to it so it’s not terrible, I think, but I can do better. I just don’t want to waste any more time on this one, so I’ll move onto something new here shortly.
Painting 13:
Good, almost spectacular. Love the island, sand of the beach (the texture and the wet sand) and the crashing waves (the blue\green\white combination, I have tried crashing waves and never came close to capturing it like you have). The sky is nice but not up to the standards of the rest. The one thing that is strange is the line from the top of the beach across the water. It looks like the water is falling down due the the angle of the waves and there is calm water up there and everything falls away.
Scott, is it OK to comment like this? I’m just a beginner myself and feel like it’s not my place to say negative things.
For sure - I’ve only been doing this since Feb, it would be weird if I was already producing perfect, amazing pieces and had no room to improve!
As for your notes, I didn’t like how dark the sky turned out - though to be fair, every painting has been a little worse when taken a picture of via iPhone - the iPhone just picks up so many details the eye doesn’t, like the clouds look a lot better in person. However, just for fun (and I don’t want to start a new project yet until new brushes I ordered come on this weekend), I re-taped up the horizon and edges and painted a much brighter/lighter sky and I’m going to take another run at some clouds. Not because you had criticized anything - in fact I’d already decided to do it when I was going to bed last night, hours before I read your comment. I really like the one set of clouds closest to the horizon, so I may try and re-create those and leave most of the sky as a nice, cloud-less bright blue.
I’ll see what I can do about the “distant water” - that might be tricky, maybe just a few dashes of white and some darker swirls of blue. Can’t hurt anything.
And lastly, the big thing I wanted to do was sneak a palm tree in from off camera, which is what the original I was following along did. I used a much smaller canvas than he and there isn’t as much room for it, but I had an idea this morning, which is another part of why I taped it up again to keep massaging it.
Thanks for the feedback!
Man, that’s still too dark. This might take a minute to get where I’m happy with it.
EDIT: And here we go, brighter sky that I’m happier with, more details in general, and a palm tree.
Painting 14b:
