Paintings #3 and #4

I had my painting class on Tuesday this week. I am one of only 3 students that are painting in oil, the rest are painting in acrylic. Our instructor highly recommends acrylic if we really want to learn how to be proficient at painting.

That sounded a little odd to me. He said that oil is much more forgiving because you can ‘erase’ with paint whereas acrylic is a lot more difficult to control because is dries rather fast.

I told him I had been a student of watercolor and I could appreciate that but now it was time to have some forgiveness if he knew what I meant.

So….don’t laugh you all. For these next two paintings I went out to a local forest preserve park that is close to our home and did a few sketches. One of these paintings was done from life ‘en plein air’ and the other was painted in class and finished up here at home.

I have to say I learned a lot from these paintings, mostly because I don’t yet know what I’m doing. It is a little frustrating but I’ll venture on!

Number 3
Buffalo Creek Study #1
12”x16”
Oil on Canvas Board

Like I mentioned earlier, this was done from life so I think my colors might be a bit more realistic. I was having the darndest time trying to figure out how to paint dried grasses and vegetation! This is so much harder than I thought it would be.

Number 4
Buffalo Creek Study #2
12” x 16”
Oil on Canvas Board

The first session on this painting was in class and I started it very similar to the first study, but I had to make up some of the colors. When I got home I really thought it was too light and started adding deeper and darker color and thicker paint.

Now that I’ve had a chance to do some research at the library and go to the store and pick up a book on landscape oil painting I see two things I did right off the bat that are inaccurate (and if you actually go outside and squint this will be true too). The sky should have been a darker shade of blue towards the top, instead of near the horizon like mine and that band of trees in the background should have been much much lighter in color, not dark like I did. I tried to correct it but it still is really, really dark. The problem with having something really strong and dark in the distance is that your eye goes to that point, in which case that really wasn’t my goal. Oops. Paint and Learn.

Still figuring out how to do reflections in the water.

And those grasses? Aaagh!

I found this Winslow Homer painting (Veteran In A New Field) in a book at the library and if only I could make my grasses look like his wheat!!!! How’d he do that?!!!! Venturing forward…