Well, I hope you aren't keeping track because this is "Daily Painting" #6, but there have been a couple of days in between! I suppose I should call them Nearly Daily Paintings :)
This little project has led me to going back through my reference photos to try to bring some sort of order to them as well. I make folders with titles like: mountains, water, florals, birds, etc etc and then move my photos into them. I also have photos called "To Do" where I keep the ones I'm sure I want to paint soon. It all sort of works! Takes some time, but its fun to run across photos I had forgotten I even took. Like this one - I was doing an experiment to try to show how reflections in water change with your eye level, and with how close to the water the reflected element is. My cat Pooty couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing!
So, I found the reference for this little garden painting in my reorganizing. One thing that's really starting to sink in for me is the importance of doing a small thumbnail sketch. Because I know I only have an hour of painting time, I'm motivated to do all my editing and simplifying before I get started. In the past I would just jump right in and figure it our as I went along. This is easier to do with regular acrylics which dry quickly. I can just repaint if I get it wrong. Using a thumbnail to do this in advance really helps to keep the painting looking more fresh. And with the Open acrylics I'm using, I don't have the option of painting over.
Here's the reference, and my thumbnail simplifying the shapes and values:
You can see there was a lot of detail to sort through. And the Photo had completely blown out the light areas so that had to be compensated for. At least you can see into the shadow areas, photos tend to make those all dark and murky.
Anyway, here's what I came up with in an hour's painting time:
"Garden Path" 5x7 acrylic on canvas panel
Original available via the Paypal button below, or directly from me if you are local
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