Panther Alicia

From one of my favourite photos ever, here's Alicia doing her trademark big cat face.

Alicia: (sigh)

This painting only took two sessions to complete. It's my first real portrait, and while it could be improved, I'm very happy with it.

For this painting, I tried very hard to work on my shading and lighting. For example, the coffee cup sprung into three-dimensions with just a little bit of shading, though the top isn't quite right.

It's also surprisingly hard to make a rich purple. Mixing red and blue gives a very weak colour, not the imperial purple I was hoping for. My book says that you really need to buy a tube of purple, which is a good excuse to go buy more colours.

March Second Weekend

The second weekend of March, we worked on a few more paintings.

One of Alicia's is a Mediterranean style street, while the other is a cooking-themed still life.

Note that the wine bottle isn't finished yet.

Alicia: I also want to fix the shading on this one ...

 

I was still working away on my windmill, and car paintings.

Alicia: He also started a painting of me which started off kind of poorly (in my opinion not so flattering …) and turned out rather good, although I’m not sure I would have chosen the particular picture he has… He loves it though!

 

Bentley: It's the panther one...

March First Weekend

We took some time to paint on the first weekend of March, which we’re getting back into and really enjoying, especially since we bought some new and vibrant colours. Alicia continued on the seascape she had started and I continued with my windmill painting.

 

Here's the finished painting, from May:

Alicia: Didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped ... Had trouble blending things well on the beach, although I like the kids in the water ...

February Paintings

Here's some of our paintings in February.

This mountain one did not photograph well. It's much richer in person. I was going for moody and dark with this one. Kind of a medieval vibe with small campfires of different armies camped out by the mountain.

Here's Alicia's flowers. They turned out very well!

Alicia had started a painting with a two-pronged pink shape, which we couldn't remember what she wanted to start. She decided to turn it into an evil bunny.

Alicia: This is the result of a lot of leftover pink paint ....

Painting Together

2018 has seen the restart of our painting careers!

Alicia picked up a book on painting with palette knives. With her abstract style, it makes for fast and good-looking work.

My technique has remained with the brushes. But I am jealous of the speed and visual style of the knife technique. Plus. it makes it almost instantaneous to clean up after.

Alicia's first knife technique painting are these wonderful cliffs. I love the texture to them.

Alicia: Working with the different knives is fun and figuring out the layering was interesting. I prefer to keep things abstract and am more lazy than Bentley with the paintings.

In this painting session, we ended up with some extra orange paint. So we decided to paint squashes, based on the reference photo you see in the upper-right.

Ours turned out very well, though my shadow and table aren't the best. I picked a blue background because it's opposite on the colour wheel to orange. It really helps it pop out.

I prefer Bentley's to mine, as his shading is really great ... My maple leaves look like star-fishes ...

Here's a look at the drying paintings:

Top left to right: Squash (Bentley), Squash (Alicia), Mountain (Bentley), Car (Bentley).
Mid left to right: Base for vase of flowers (Alicia), Cliffs (Alicia).
Bottom left to right: Base for seascape (Alicia), Base for windmill (Bentley).

Sketches

On our 2017 holiday, I started doing some sketches in a little sketchpad. They are hit-and-miss for sure. Here's my favourite one, of us:

I also did this waterfall scene late one night, with coloured pencils:

Paint Night Painting

Acrylic on canvas


Alicia went to paint night with some of her friends. Unlike the original painting, however, Alicia added a much better perspective, and an interesting twist of leaves.

Alicia: the colours are also completely different than the “sample” one. It’s background was pink and much lighter but I went with a more fall toned scheme.