Apart from being a great painting tool, it also has an application for Mac which lets me open the painting and export a much larger (than iPad) version of the picture, which is very good for making prints.  It also lets me export a video of the painting being made – every brushstroke!

So here’s the painting I made – note that this was intended to be a colour study only and hence I haven’t taken enormous care with the drawing, and following that, you can watch the video and see how the painting was put together.

This is a first for me, obviously, so please leave me a comment and tell me if you find it interesting and/or useful!

Some time ago I signed up to be a part of the second Twitter Art Exhibit organised by David Sandum.  This weekend I finally had the energy to do a painting for it.  It was an interesting experience for me – as somebody who trumpets the virtues of working large, to have to create a postcard size painting was a bit of a shock!  However, the subject I wanted to paint did not contain a lot of fiddly detail, and it also meant I was able to complete the painting in just a couple of hours (spread over two days).

Incidentally, as you’ll have guessed from the title, Pelicans are my favourite bird.  I grew up in a river town and there were always pelicans around, and I just adore them.  I do see them here in Sydney from time to time as well and it’s always a thrill.

As time was an issue (the painting must be in Norway by March 30th), I decided to use my Atelier Interactive Acrylics (I had originally planned to use oils, but at this late stage they would not dry in time).  I had previously painted two coats of gesso onto some 300gsm watercolour paper and drawn a postcard-size box to work in.

First, I did the sketch and transferred it to the paper.

Then I used Burnt Umber and White to create a tonal painting.  You might wonder why I chose Burnt Umber and not black — the reason is, when the burnt umber shows through the final painting, it’s warm, whereas if I used black, it would be cold.  Since this painting is all about sunshine at the beach, a warm underpainting is a must!  To get the really dark darks, I simply painted several layers of burnt umber.

Once that had dried overnight, I painted the background colours in.

Finally, I painted the pelican, plus a few extra bits of colour into the background to bring out a few ripples in the water.

I am very, very pleased with how this one turned out.  It joins “One Day I’ll Learn” and “Surprise” on my list of paintings I’m genuinely happy with – interestingly, all of these had one thing in common: I started with a tonal underpainting.  Seems that I have learned something important about what works for me!

I’m sorry to see this painting go, but it’s for a very good cause.  I hope somebody buys it and loves it as much as I do!

More sadly, our beloved dog BB, who was diagnosed with cancer last year, started deteriorating sharply in December. She made it through Christmas and New Year, but last week we made the choice to have her put down as her quality of life had become very minimal. Of course it was (and is) extremely sad, but she was 15 years old, a very good age for a dog of her size and breed, and she had had a good life with us, so we were able to do one final act of kindness for her. For the first time in 16 years, we now don’t have a dog in the house, and it seems very quiet. The three cats are not quite sure what to make of it all either.

A few days prior to BB’s passing, I started painting a portrait of her, determined to push through my own health issues. I was able to work on it for two days but I haven’t been back to it since. Luckily, this is not a problem with the Genesis paints! I am very pleased with the progress of it so far, but more than a little frustrated that my health is preventing me getting back to work on it. Here’s a photo of how it looks at the moment – it’s on a 20″x16″ canvas.

BB painting, work in progress

I hope you all had a better Christmas/New Year than we did, and I hope we all have a better 2012 than 2011 was.

But today, finally, I felt well enough to press on, and after a while I was a little surprised when I stepped back and realised there really wasn’t anything left to do but sign it

The painting is titled “The End and The Beginning”.  Atelier interactive acrylics on masonite, 18″x24″.  This one is for my personal collection!

Click the thumbnail to see the a bigger image – or to see the full-size photo, view it at DeviantArt.

However, Photoshop has proved to be very useful to my current painting, as you’ll see.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have reconnected with my deep love for fantasy (and sci-fi) art but I wasn’t sure if I could do it.  So about a week ago I decided to just lay out some paints and start throwing a painting together out of my imagination. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen the progress pictures (see what you miss if you don’t follow me on Twitter?).

Here’s where the painting is at right now;

In my plan, there is a figure in the foreground, holding a sword, staring towards the city.  However, having reached this stage in the painting, I realised that I’d given myself an extremely tricky perspective, as the viewer is looking down at the back of the figure.  I also wasn’t at all sure exactly how large I want the figure, or exactly where they’re standing.

So when the afternoon sun came into my studio at more or less the right angle today, I posed my wooden mannequin and photographed it from a variety of heights and angles.  Here’s one of those pictures;

I then put these, along with the picture of the painting, into Photoshop.  I used the tools to erase the background of the mannequin shots, leaving just the figure and the shadow, and then played around with the scale and position until it was “standing” in a place that looked good against the background.  Here’s the end result;

Having printed this out, I now have a reference to proceed with the painting, secure in the knowledge of the perspective, positioning, lighting, and even the shadow.

There will be more foreground detail, and of course the figure will be dressed, so stay tuned (and watch Twitter) to see how the painting turns out!

What I have been doing is a lot of cooking, because Savannah and I are participating in Vegan Mofo (Vegan Month Of Food) this month. We have had a great time cooking a lot of new recipes, and she has been photographing and blogging about them. You can see and read about that at her blog: In Her Grace.

I haven’t done any more work on the nude, the oils I had mixed dried out and the idea of recreating the mixes seemed like entirely too much bother. This got me thinking about the Genesis paints again – the oil paints that literally never dry until you want them to. Why did I stop using them again? Oh right, because I got obsessed with the idea that I had to use “real” oil paints if I wanted to be a “real” artist. I wonder if “real” oil painters expressed the same prejudices when acrylics started to get popular. Or tempura painters, when oils were invented. Anyway, with 20/20 hindsight I can see that I made good paintings with Genesis and that’s all that truly matters, and anybody who thinks otherwise is being an elitist twat. That said, I guess that it’s “horses for courses”, and I’m sure I’ll go on changing from one paint to the next depending on my mood!

Let’s see, what else? I’ve actually found some time to read a book – “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. As a dyed-in-the-wool child and fan of the 80′s, I’m enjoying it immensely, but even if you’re not an 80′s fan it’s a great story. I’m halfway through the book and frustrated I can’t find the time to read more of it, but tomorrow is looking clear so far.

I’ve also been thinking a great deal about what I paint – last week we finally got around to watching Legend Of The Guardians – The Owls Of Ga’Hoole and the location art was so breathtakingly beautiful that it rekindled my desire to paint fantasy art in a major way. Given that it’s difficult for me to get to any actual landscape to paint, and using live models for portraits and nude work is also a fiscal improbability, developing the ability to paint from my imagination does seems a logical and appealing choice, but how much of that needs to be grounded in the ability to paint actual reality? No, I don’t know either. I do have a number of books about painting fantasy, now I just need an extra ten hours each day to read them, work through them, practice … maybe next month when Vegan Mofo is over.

Lastly I want to give a shout-out and link to somebody I discovered via Youtube when I was looking for cloud painting demos. This is the first of three clips showing a painting almost completely from beginning to end, and I learnt a lot just watching how he painted clouds, even though it was speeded up!

Daniel offers coaching in person and online, which I plan to utilise in (hopefully) the near future!  You can find out more at his website – http://www.danieltibbits.com.

Here’s how it looks now – I’d say one more session after this dries and it will be complete

You can click the pictures below to see a larger version, but to see the full-size versions, please go to my Flickr account.

Working in oil on an 11×14″ canvas panel, so far I have laid in the sketch and some basic shading in raw umber just to get a feel for the form.  I’ll let this dry and get some colour happening in the next session.

This is also the first time I’ve used my new camera (Sony DSC-HX100V) to photograph a painting, and I’m happy to see it does an excellent job

I have edited the previous post and replaced my “final” picture with this much better one