Irvine Park II

Irvine Park

Image Size 9" x 9"

Oil

I've finished another unfinished project.  Yay!!  I must have started this at least 10 years ago when I tried plein air painting for the first time.  I finished it in my studio making it up as I went since I didn't have a reference.  It was a good exercise and it felt good to finish another project.

A View From The Bluffs

A View From The Bluffs

Image Size 8" x 10"

Oil

This is another view from Heisler Park, which is on the bluffs above the beach in Laguna Beach.  I love these red flowers on the aloe plants that are growing all along the bluffs.  This is one of the most beautiful places I've seen and I'm lucky that I live fairly close to it.  

I painted this on a 8" x 10" canvas which is very different for me.  I usually like to paint on square or long, skinny canvas shapes but this scene seemed like it would look best on this shape.

Loose Landscape

I haven't done silk painting for awhile and wanted to try doing one without resist and playing with hard and soft edges.  I did the sky first wet into wet and allowed it to dry.  Then I did the distant hills and let that area dry.  When you add silk dyes to an area that already has been dyed and dried, a hard line forms.  Sometimes that is a good effect and sometimes it is not.  I was trying for that technique with this project.  I continued to add colors once the previous layer was dry and then I added textures by drying the silk and adding more dyes.  I thought my background hills were going to be lighter than the foreground area when I was dying it but obviously, I miscalculated it.  I should have added the background hills while the sky was wet so that the edges were soft which would make that area recede.

There are things I would do some things differently next time but I think it does look interesting.  I'm really happy with the sky though and I like the juxtaposition of the realistic sky and the stylized ground.

Golden Plumeria

This is another painting that was started a long time ago.  The background was done but nothing else.  In person, the blue is much prettier.  It is a clear, cool blue, but this is how my camera saw it.  I'm not into painting flowers as much as I used to be, but it feels good to finish another unfinished project.

Hot press paper isn't usually my favorite surface on which to paint but this wasn't too bad.  The paint tends to sit on the surface of the paper rather than settling in so it is really easy to lift but harder to build up glazes without lifting what you don't want lifted.  You can see the unevenness in the background.  It is hard to get a smooth wash on this surface too, but in person, you can see the granulation of the pigment rather than splotchiness, which is actually very interesting.