A Good Painting Day

What makes a good painting day? So glad you asked. It is a day where I make visible progress on paintings, the kind of progress that makes me like the pieces I am working on, and the kind of progress that brings me closer to putting the paintings on the DONE list of Tulare County’s prettiest places.

I didn’t photograph this one after putting on the final touches, so I’ll just tell you that I fixed the branch in the center that is too light and too straight. I also added a few branches hanging down in front of the main tree with leaves and a hint of olives. Then, I signed it!

The road is dirt now. Yeah, yeah, I know that Dry Creek Road is paved, has a center line, and feels like a freeway compared to the Mineral King Road. But this is my painting. So, moo. I also tightened a few details on the barn.

This one needs to dry so that I can add wildflowers. Looks as if that leaning tree on the left could use a bit of straightening. It didn’t look weird in the photo, but it isn’t translating well here. When the flowers are in the painting, I will do a post showing you all the photos that I used to make this scene, which is the best representation of my memory of walking this trail on a very early morning last spring. The photos just don’t tell the story.

This painting is another compilation, or perhaps amalgamation is a better word, of many photos. I know how it looks in person, the camera doesn’t tell the story, and so I mess with the photos on Photoshop to see if I can make the different elements work together. Then I use that to create the scene I remember.

This was so fun. It felt as if I was painting for an hour or so, and suddenly, the day was over!

Four New Starts, One Signature, and My Yard

Let’s start with the signature. This indicates that I am finished with a painting, although I can be convinced to return to it later if something needs fixing up, something that I didn’t notice earlier.

Now, to the new paintings. As normal, I studied my photos, messed with a few on Photoshop Jr. in order to blend several images of the same scene into a more perfect version (if one ignores all the sloppy photoshop seams), looked at the available canvases and chose sizes.

The first one is a 10×10 scene of a trail, not a road. I’m tired of struggling with roads. At the time of these four new starts, I have 2 paintings with unsatisfactory roads holding up the completion. Roadwork is often an obstacle to progress, don’t you think?

This might be easy for a few folks to recognize, although I’ve never painted this view before. Getting the shapes right was tricky, because I blended several photos together, so after messing with the shapes for awhile, I realized that the sky would be an easy step forward.

I’ve never painted this scene before either, and yet I am boldly marching forth on a 16×20 canvas, which is quite huge for me. It will have a stormy sky, in case you are wondering why it is grayish.

Finally, here is one that is probably going to be the most difficult. The size is 10×20″, and once again, it is a scene I haven’t attempted before. I drew the general shapes first. It felt too hard, with many of the shapes fuzzy in the distance, morphing into the next shapes, looking enough alike to confound me each time I looked at the photo.

Baby steps. Just get some color down, Central California Artist—it ain’t rocket surgery!

Sky. I can paint sky without too many worries.

Some days painting feels very difficult. If my feet didn’t already hurt, I might be tempted to go find a job as a waitress, a cafeteria worker, or maybe as a checker in a grocery store. HOWEVER, I feel a calling, a responsibility, almost a sense of urgency to paint the prettiest places in Tulare County before I am too old or they are all gone.

LOOK AT MY YARD RIGHT NOW!! (Those are flowering quince.)

Farming With Paint?

This day’s oil painting session went from an olive grove to a walnut grove. (Grove or orchard? Same thing.) The day ended with a potential cattle ranch.

The last olive grove painting session left me with this mess to tackle, layer by layer.

I began with improving the trunks and branches. Here you can see one of the main reference photos.

Next I put in leafy texture.

The front gnarly trunk needed detailing, and now it needs to dry. After it dries, I will fix anything that is looking wrong, and then, if the paint is flowing well, if the force is with my brushes, and if I become one with the canvas, I hope to put in some close branches where you can see leaves and olives.

Time to visit a walnut grove. Clearly, this is a walnut grove, no?

No. It is not clearly a walnut grove. All the lined up trees seemed difficult (read “impossible”). I started with the closer trees.

Here you can see the main reference photo. It was a little tricky to condense a rectangle into a square and do it believably. I don’t feel the need to put in every tree. I do feel the need to have the trees line up in their rows. (How do farmers plant their orchards so perfectly?)

I got tired of brown, so I moved to the distant horizon line and put in the sunlit green in the distance, and then patches of sunlight on the ground. It isn’t as close to finished as the olive grove painting, but I ran out of daylight and the cats wanted to reclaim the workshop as their cafeteria and dorm.

But first, I erased the center line on the road of this painting. There was a bit of a pickle here: I want cows, but that means a fence, and without a real photo of a fence in this position, it is too risky in terms of believability. I could do it if it meant saving all the women and children, but this doesn’t come anywhere near that sense of desperation. So, I messed up the center line and the asphalt, and when it dries, I will try to make it look like dirt or gravel, which means the cows won’t need a fence.

It was really getting dark out. I was cold, tired of difficult decisions, and the cats wanted dinner, so that was the end of my day of farming with a paintbrush in the groves, orchards and ranches of Tulare County.

Little Things Mean a Lot

It often just comes down to the little things, the details, those finishing touches on a painting that bring the most satisfaction. Here are five paintings that I added little things to on a single morning of painting.

Tucker wanted to know if I was going to be there for awhile.

Big Oak: I studied this painting for awhile and decided the dirt patch at the bottom might be too large— “might be” was enough to make me go back to touch it up.

I signed it too. Wow. Was that worth the effort? Maybe.

Square Orange Grove: I thought this was finished but maybe I wasn’t convinced, because I didn’t sign it. Trail Guy asked me why I hadn’t put orange blossoms on the close trees. Ummm, I forgot. . .

Excellent! And now it is signed too. All it needs is a title (I’ve been calling it The 16×16″), photography, and varnish.

Take Me Home: I tried to put a single leaf in tight detail on the road. It looked dumb. So, I put in texture to resemble dirt, rocks, sticks, and basic dirt road debris. Then I signed it. I don’t want to work on this painting anymore. (But I will if someone tells me something that would make a measurable difference.)

Homer Barn: I had forgotten to put the trees on top of the left hills, and the road wasn’t quite right. I worked on the shoulder of the road and added a layer to the field on the right.

Now I have to decide if it should have cows on the right, which will mean it needs a fence. I’ll just wait on these decisions until the road and other new parts are dry.

Dry Creek Wildflowers: more lupine and leaves on the skeletal tree were needed.

This could be signed now, but then again, I might keep “polishing”. I might want to keep this one. . . maybe I’ll just keep working on it so it isn’t ever quite ready to sell.

Yeppers, Tuck, I was here long enough to bore you to sleep.

And thus we conclude another tour through painting the prettiest places in Tulare County.

A Three-Painting Day

Three paintings of Tulare County scenery were brought closer to completion on a productive day of painting. Two were fun, and one is still riding the struggle bus.

Not a lot to say about this other than I photographed each step.

It was fun to detail the unusual barn, and now I need to detail the road and lower right pasture.

This painting is really fun. I filled in green around the rest of the poppies, added more green in the lower regions, built the oak tree (needs the beginnings of spring leaves), and put the lupine stalks in place.

I took this painting to a life-long friend for her input. She has a great eye for design and has assisted me in the past. She suggested more of an overarching canopy and more detail on the road (which was also suggested by my friend and blog reader MB). I got this far on the canopy before the light ran out.

Maybe adding tire tracks, more light, and some dirt clods will be all this piece requires before it exits the struggle bus.

Big Oak Tree

Did you know that Tulare County is home to the largest oaks in the country? The valley oak, quercus lobata is not what this big oak tree is. I found this tree somewhere along Dry Creek Road. I didn’t get close enough to know what kind, but I can tell by the shape that this isn’t a valley oak. It is unusually perfect, almost symmetrical, and all without ever having been pruned (except when cattle chew on the lower leaves.)

Sky and distant ridge.
Distant waves of wildflowers, closer blades of grass.
Added wildflowers, a rock, more blades of grass and a few limbs because I couldn’t wait to get to that tree.
Details in the grass, another rock, and details in the dirt.
Finally started on the tree.
Am I finished? Time will tell.

Once it is dry, I will sign it, paint the edges, and either photograph or scan it, so you can see it with its brighter and more accurate colors.

Layer by Layer, Little by Little, II

Nope, it’s not Moro Rock.

Layer by layer, little by little, these two paintings are inching ahead in spite of the Central California artist’s desire to park indoors by the wood stove with a book.

The top one is 12×16″, an odd barn along Dry Creek Road, known as the Homer Barn. The bottom one is 11×14″, some perfect oak tree with wildflowers beneath on some perfect day of driving Dry Creek Road, in Tulare County, California’s flyover country. But don’t forget that we feed the world. (And don’t move here either, because we are all fat, uneducated, poor, and the air is terrible.)

Green and Orange

Poppies and oranges are two of my most popular subjects. Orange and green, green and orange. Orange is yellow and red; green is yellow and blue. I’m getting more relaxed about the specific shades of each, focusing more on values, which is Artspeak for darks and lights.

This painting will take awhile, because I want it to be perfect. Do I always say that? Prolly not. I’m not a perfectionist. It takes discipline to keep returning to the same painting over and over when I just want to cross it off my list and keep going on to the next one. BUT, I have learned that it is better to be a little annoyed during the process than embarrassed later.

This one has been very fun. It seems finished now, but chances are that I will see small things to correct once it is dry.

Finally, this one has orange trees that are green but the ones on the right are really wet and shiny.

This is an excellent example of how to not photograph a painting.

All three paintings show the beautiful parts of Tulare County at the prettiest time of year. When these are finished, I will begin one in the fall season. It won’t be orange or green.

Another of Tulare County’s Prettiest Places

Maybe “Tulare County’s Prettiest Places” would be the right name for my show at CACHE.

But what if I want to paint other places too?

Who will want other places? My fan club (fall down laughing) is based here in Tulare County.

Enough already with the speculation and analysis—let’s paint.

This is Rocky Hill Drive, probably the most popular outdoor place to run, walk, and bikeride in Tulare County.

WAIT—”Popular Pretty Places”?

Stop it and just get on with the painting, will ya?

You can’t go up on Rocky Hill itself, only up between Rocky Hill and Badger Hill. But in the very flat land of the flatlands, this is the only place for walking uphill or downhill.

This 6×18″ oil painting needs better detail on the orange trees, the shoulders of the road, and maybe even some work on the center line once all this paint dries a bit.

One of Tulare County’s Pretty Places

Remember seeing this 16×20″ mess first layer?

I think it will be a good one. I combined about 4 photos on Photoshop Junior* to see if my version of this scene was better than reality and concluded that yes, indeedy it is, or it will be if I can execute it with excellence.

Let’s go!

I am choosing to not show the beginning photos for a couple of reasons.

  1. I don’t want any input as to whether or not I have chosen the correct elements in the correct sizes and placements. Sometimes I do want input; this time I do not; that could change. . .
  2. I want you all to judge the painting on its own merits rather than whether or not I can accurately copy a photograph.

Phooey. I can see 3 shapes that look wrong right now. “Wrong” in that they don’t look fully natural or believable, because I am only judging this painting of one of Tulare County’s pretty places on its own merits, not while looking at any photos.

*Photoshop Elements is the “easy” version of Photoshop.