Saturday Plein Air - Everal Homestead

Today we painted at the Everal Homestead in Westerville. I used my iPod touch to take photos today, to see how well they turned out. This way they are already in the "cloud", instead of having to download them from my camera. I edited a few with iPhoto on my iPad and am posting this with the Blogsy App, and I am curious how this will look when I open the PC.

Photo taken with ipod touch

Taken with the Canon Elph

(I edited this post on the PC, and uploaded the Canon Elph photos to see the difference.)

I liked the light hitting the little brick shed and the bushes nearby. Although there are some areas that could use more refining, I am pretty happy with this painting. The iPod photos seem a bit fuzzy though.

I worked in oils on a Masonite panel that had an oil primed surface, but I've found that too slick, so I put clear gesso on it last night. That gave it more tooth, but it is rough on the bristles. I'll use regular gesso next time.

photo from iPod touch

photo from Canon Elph

Do you see any difference? I noticed one BIG difference. the iPod photo is an earlier shot before I finished the painting! hahaha...DUH.  That aside, the Canon shot is much clearer and the colors truer. Not sure it really makes too much difference in the long run, since anyone viewing my blog will have a different monitor and not really know what the paintings look like in person.

Here's some other shots of the park:

Posted with Blogsy

Saturday Plein Air - Palmo's "the Land"

We had a fantastic day painting! We were invited to a fellow COPA member's land near Mt. Vernon Ohio. It is about 20 acres which includes a pond, woods, meadows and some interesting buildings. It was a pretty hot day, but I was able to setup in the shade, looking across the pond. I did an oil painting of the view.

forgive the glare!

Then I walked to the other side of the pond and sat on the porch of the blue cabin and used a mini-pastel setup to quickly paint a 4x6 pastel. I painted on a piece of paper that I had coated with black gesso and pumice. I love painting on black surfaces!

I've owned a Judson's Art Outfitters 5"x7" pocket box for a few years, but I never seem to use it. I decided to make it into a tiny pastel kit. I put some NuPastels and most of a half stick box of Sennelier pastels into a plastic container that fit perfectly into the pocket box. I cut a piece of Gatorboard for a board to tape my paper on, and put a small sketchbook in the carry bag to use the pages to protect the paintings when I was finished. Everything fit nicely inside the canvas carry bag that came with the pocket box.

This is my favorite painting of the day. I love it!

Here was the view:

We had our critique and then had a cookout! It was great fun!

 The little blue cabin is hidden in the woods to the left in the picture above.

Sometimes You Just Want to Play

Sometimes you just want to play in the studio, but really don't have a subject that excites you, nor much time to spend on it. When I got back into painting about 8 years ago, I started out with watercolors.  I have lots of fair watercolors in my closet. I decided to use one to see if adding pastel would improve it.

Here is the original watercolor:

I spread on a layer of my homemade pumice gel mixture and let it dry:

 I started applying some pastels, and really didn't like the wine bottle on the left:

So in the end I covered the bottle up and darkened the background. Although the painting is a bit better, it's not one that will be framed, and I had some fun playing with it!