Step by Step Landscape in Acrylic - August Afternoon

My main genre is still life, however I really enjoy mixing in a landscape or an architectural painting, just to loosen up a bit. This image is the entrance to the old farm on Hornby Island, British Columbia. It's a beautiful spot. Every time I visit Hornby I photograph the entrance to the farm. There's something so peaceful about it, and the road leading in makes me want to follow it.

I started by cropping the image for compositional purposes. I wanted the two trees to fall at the 'law of thirds' intersection. For those of you who may not know, if you divide your canvas into thirds horizontally and vertically, the intersection of the lines in four places, offer good locations to position the focal point.

Using Transparent Red Iron Oxide, I warmly coloured the ground on the canvas, and to blocked in the basic shapes. A warm red tone is a nice counterbalance to the greens in the trees. 

I started to block in the colour in each shape and to develop the foreground a bit. The darker shade area in the foreground and the light of the sky, helped to gauge the values of the rest of the painting.

I continued developing the painting adding a bit more red tone with burnt sienna mixed with some napthol red, creating branches in the trees. I removed the barn because it was distracting from the focal point.

I broke up the solid tree branch shapes with more variety in value and colour,  strengthened the colour of the sky, and cooled down and lightened the background trees so they moved back in space. The foreground was developed a bit more as well. I used acrylic medium to blend the grass shapes and added some more darks.

The name chosen for this painting is August Afternoon, and I felt the colour of the field wasn't reflecting the impression of a hot summer afternoon. I used glazing fluid and glazed a warm golden colour of hanza yellow deep broken with a bit of ultramarine and alizarin crimson. I added some grass in the field, and developed some lights in the trees to finish it off. 

On a hot August afternoon the entrance to the farm is so still and peaceful. You can hear a few crickets and the breeze moving the branches and it's all about sun and shade. Truly idyllic.

August Afternoon   16 x 16  Acrylic  $650

Step by Step Landscape in Acrylic - August Afternoon

Still Life with Starfruit

This is a step by step of a commission that I just completed for a client who is collecting a series of these long narrow still life canvases. I had never thought of painting starfruit because it wasn't a fruit I was at all familiar with, however, it has beautiful form and created an interesting shadow along the edge of the bowl. My client requested this particular cloth, which is an Egyptian Prayer Rug, and the plate is Turkish. It made a nice exotic combination.

 

Because the plate had white in it, the cloth was creamy white, and the starfruit was basically white with touches of yellow and green, I had to evolve into how to create a vibrant colourful painting, as my client and I both love colour. So I started with something I know well - grapes.

I started adding colour and pumped up the vibrancy of the star fruit by bringing out the yellow and green.

I decided at this point that the contrast of the shadow shapes in the cloth were far too strong, (I was working from a few photographs as well as some of it from life) so as I changed the colour of the cloth, I also softened the shadow effect.

This photo was taken inside on my easel and the colours appear very cool. I slept on it and decided to soften the contrast slightly and warm up the lights a bit.

Here is the final painting which I shot outdoors in the shade. The colours came out much warmer here. I felt it was a very busy painting with the patterns in the cloth and plate, so for compositional purposes I softened the colours in the fabric above the plate. 

I find commissions very challenging because they are someone else's inspiration rather than your own. In the end, this painting became one of mine, but I had some moments of struggling. I really like the person I was painting this for, and concentrated on created a thing of beauty for this special client. 

When you paint commissions how do become inspired by the content if it's not necessarily something you would choose to paint?

Still Life with Starfruit