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.

Heisler Park Vista

This is the third time I've painted this scene and I think it will be my last.  I really do need to get some new reference photos.  The first two were only 6" x 6" and this one is 14" x 14".  I painted this one to enter into a contest so wish me luck.

Heisler Park Vista
Image size 14" x 14"
Oil

Palm Trio

It's always relaxing to think of palm trees on a secluded beach during cold weather.   I know the weather we are having isn't considered to be cold by most standards but I'm freezing!  Painting this scene made me feel warmer.

The craziness of the holiday season has kept me from painting very much but I was able to finish this small oil this week.  Hopefully, I will be able to paint more this coming week.

Palm Trio
Image size 6" x 12"
Oil

Tropics

I'm back to playing with the palette knife.  I've been having so much fun painting beach scenes that I wanted to try it with another tool.  I'm not sure how successful the palm trees are but they sure were fun to paint.

Tropics
6" x 6"
Oil

Costa Brava Palms

This is a wall mural that I did in acrylic. I started working on it back in November and I'm calling it finished but it's probably not. Originally I had drawn in a hammock between the palm trees but ended up leaving it out. That decision was made more because I was tired of working on it than because I thought it looked better without it.

The only other mural I have done was on the side of our house in an enclosed patio area. The total area was about 3' tall by about 60'. The walls were stucco and I used house paint. That really used a lot because the texture of the stucco used up so much paint. I painted the patio mural about 3 years ago and it looks exactly the same as it did then and doesn't look like it has faded at all. One wall gets sun all day and it looks no different than the walls in the shade. Since that was painted, I've been told that artist acrylics are very different than acrylic house paint because there is much more pigment and acrylic binder in the artist acrylics which should make them a better quality paint.

I bought some cheap acrylics (artist acrylic) to use on this mural because I thought I was going to use a lot of paint like I did in my first mural and I didn't want to waste my Golden acrylics. I figured even cheap artist acrylic would be better than using house paint. That old adage "you get what you pay for" was really true in this case. The new acrylics had the same pasty texture as my 20 year old acrylics had. I threw those old ones away and the same will probably happen with the new ones. There was so much drag, even when I was using matte medium to thin them, and that was making me curse. If you are thinking of buying acrylics and want to know what NOT to buy, send me an e-mail and I will tell you the brand name.

I've posted the work in progress photos below. You can probably see the hammock drawn in the first and second photos. Let me know if you think I should add it or not. Also, I had originally intended to have bougainvillea in the foreground. What do you think?

Costa Brava Palms

Image size 44" x 57"

Acrylic

Drifting Dunes

Well, this is very different for me. I've done a pastel two weeks in a row. I really do enjoy working with pastels but I don't think to use it that often. This was done for the March virtual paintout challenge. This month the location is Stavanger, Norway. It really is a beautiful place. These sand dunes look like they should be in a much more southern locale, don't they? I used Canson Mi-Teintes paper as the support for this. I hadn't used that paper for quite awhile. I used the back side because I don't like the texture of the front side. It's hard to get the pastel down into the little squares that the texture creates. It is a nice surface and uses a lot less pastel that the sanded surfaces. Of course, it won't hold as much pastel as the sanded surfaces but that wasn't an issue with this painting because there's not an extreme amount much layering.

Stavanger, Norway

Image size 8" x 11"

Pastel

Framed
$150.00