September 19, 2010

The moon tonight is at 91% of full! Tonight I could almost paint without auxiliary light!!! No kidding, it was so bright that I painted a lot of this one without the book light on. By the time this moon is full I'm sure that I won't need the book light. It was beautiful out tonight.


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9/19 'Calm and Quiet Night'
It was just perfect tonight. No wind, bright light, a dead end road with a farm at it's end. I sat on the tail gate of my truck for about an hour waiting for the light to the West to turn to dark. A skunk was poking around near my truck, that smell is unmistakeable, and as the light to the west faded, the light on my panel and palette became brighter and brighter. Almost bright enough to paint without the lights on. I used a palette of Viridian, Alizarin Crimson, Black, White and Yellow ochre for this one.

September 18, 2010

First day of my workshop in Zumbrota, MN and it was kind of chilly, wet and just not much fun until after lunch time! Then it warmed up a little and made our day a little bit nicer. Following class I made the drive north, made a stop in Stillwater for some homemade chicken soup (thanks Kami :), and then drove into William O'Brien State Park, just north of Marine on St. Croix, and painted this piece. Only one tonight. I'll admit to being tired by 9:30 at night, after getting on the road at 6:30 am, teaching all day and a lot of driving.


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9/18 'Moon Over O'Brien'
Almost a full moon, 5 days or so to go. I had it going, bright moon and painting away, then the clouds rolled in and that was it for me, too dark to make it interesting. I'm anxious to paint the next week when the moon is moving into it's full phase.

September 17, 2010

If you see a painting here this morning, I'm surprised! I painted one nocturne last night but wasn't sure if I'd have time this morning to post it.

I teach a 2 day workshop this weekend in Zumbrota, MN about an hour and a half from me. What I think will end up happening is this... I'm still painting nocturnes, but the posting may have to wait until Sunday or Monday morning. I'm not quite sure how else to do it. I finish up late, leave before 6:30 am to make the drive to the workshop. That doesn't leave much time to shoot, edit, post on the blog, eBay, website and Facebook.


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9/17-1 'Tangled in Blue'
This is a local dining establishment on the main drag here in Taylors Falls. On site, I could not seem to get the cool violets and blues I was seeing in the scene. Turns out that the reason was, once again, the orange street lamps. Once I was home I saw that the colors I thought I was mixing were there. This says a lot for trusting yourself when painting these things.

September 16, 2010

I feel gooo-ood! (James Brown impersonation) Back at it tonight. Looking for the half moon but the cloud cover foiled that idea. I painted the canyon walls inside the Interstate Park right at sunset for the first one, then went into down town Taylors Falls and painted the our US Post Office building.



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9/16-1 'Canyon Sunset'
The color was inspiring as the clouds just broke a enough after the sun was down to reveal the warmth of the end of the day sky!


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9/16-2 'US Post Office-Taylors Falls, MN'
This is our stalwart little post office. I just liked the light on the building front. I spend so much time there that it was good to see it from this point of view.

September 15 Nocturnes... Here's the 'Method and Materials' scoop!

I'm sitting here wishing I felt well enough to go out to paint tonight... just kidding... severe thunderstorms, heavy rain, lightening and hail, tornado warnings near by! Never mind!

So while I'm sitting here, and instead of wasting time, I thought that I'd post some info about what I use to paint, and what my approach to painting nocturnes is in order to answer a number of questions that I'm getting about this.

The Methods and Materials are really just about the same as I use during the day. Painting is painting and painting a nocturne calls for the same sensibilities to Drawing, Value, Color, Composition... Edges, Temperature and most important... Concept!

Observation is key, and painting what you see... not what you know... is essential. This is certainly true during the daylight situations also. But at night you really don't have a choice because much of what you 'think' you know about an object or situation is no longer valid. The darkness obliterates details, artificial lights can obliterate form, and the combination will leave you wondering just what it is that you're looking at. Don't worry about it, you don't need to know, if you're paying attention to putting down the correct relationships of the shapes, values and colors (with the accompanying attention to edges and the qualities of the colors... hue, intensity, value and temperature) that are before you. If you do that with a Concept in mind, you'll have a great time at this.

There is something freeing about painting at night. I suppose that in part it's because you can't see everything that is happening in the subject, or on your painting. The lights I use are great, but they're still limited and this is not like painting in good studio or north light! Even with the 'better' illumination with the LED lights, they're not perfectly color balanced. Your color mixtures will look pretty good, but they will still surprise you a little when you take the paintings inside and view them under good studio light. Painting a nocturne is always an adventure into the unknown.

All of these obstacles make painting nocturnes both a challenge and a thrill to do. And once it's dark, the light doesn't change unless the neighbor, whose house you may be painting, turns off the lights and goes to bed!

I prefer smoother surfaced panels at night so that the glare from the darker colors isn't as bad. That glare makes them hard to photograph for one, but also hard to see the painting once it's varnished.

Usually I tone the panel first with either a warm tone or a dark neutral like some black with blue and a little red mixed in. It's best to let that dry a day or so before painting on it. More and more I prefer the gray vs the warm tone.

I don't switch up my palette, though I may not use as much of the lighter value colors as I would in daylight. I tend to use more of the darker value colors like Transparent Oxide Brown or Red, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue Deep and Viridian. I do add a few colors for catching the intensity of lights at night, like red, blue and green neon. I add some Pthalo colors... blue, green, turqouise. I also like a Quinacridone red or rose for the glowing pinks of some lights.

Here's the palette-
Titanium White
Cad Lemon Yellow
Cad Yellow Deep
Yellow Ochre light
Cad Orange
Cad Scarlet
Cad Red
Quinacridone Red or Rose
Alizarin Crimson
Transparent Oxide Brown or Red
Viridian
Ultramarine Blue
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Night add ons-
Pthalo Blue, Green, Turquoise

I use the 10x12 EasyL box.

This is the Mighty Bright LED Book light.

That's the scoop! Thanks.

9/14 and 9/15 Nocturnes...

For those of you who follow this, I jumped the gun on 'thinking' I was out of the woods with this viral thing going around. I'm not. So I'm sorry but I am going to spend the next two days and kick it for good! I know I'm not painting tonight the 14th, and will see about tomorrow night.

You have no idea how much this ticks me off! I remember a year ago in April when I made it through the entire month without one measurable interruption, except for a pre-planned 3 day workshop. Looking back, that was an amazing thing to me. There's always something going on and this month seems to have it's share.

See you in a night or two. One good thing is that the moon will be about half full on the 15th.

September 13, 2010

Another gorgeous evening into night again! I'm really glad that the moon is making a presence again. The light it ads to the subject is so welcome. A friend mentioned that the northern lights should have been visible tonight, and maybe they will be later. I found this new crescent moon to be irresistible tonight. I drove over to Lindstrom tonight and painted on South Lindstrom Lake. Lindstrom is a very Swedish town as you might have guessed by the name. The sign across main street says "Valkommen till Lindstrom"... I don't know how to make the little dots over the 'o' or the 'a'.

The mosquitoes came out with a vengeance tonight. For the first painting I was almost inhaling mosquito spray there was so much in 'my' air. Did no good, they were swarming the face tonight! After the first one I scrambled out of there and came back to my house and caught the carriage house behind me with the crescent moon hovering over head.


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9/13-1 'Lake Lights'
As I mentioned, I'm really liking painting right at sunset. Especially on the lakes around here. The lake surfaces take on so much subtle color, grayed pinks, blues, violets, and greens. All very close in value and intensity and all darker and cooler than the sky. I was talking to someone about how I think that I'm going to spend more time working at this time of the day, right at the end. Only problem is that to do that you can't work large, or you can and just come back many times. To me it makes more sense to get comfortable working around 8x10 or 9x12 and limit it to that. These kind of studies make great reference, along with some digital images, back in the studio. Right now these 5x7's are plenty large to get that information down in time.


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9/13-2 'Crescent Over the Carriage House'
I drove home to try to paint the moon over the top of the hill behind my house. Problem was that it wasn't there, it was further east and over the carriage house, in between the trees. The light from my back porch added a second light source that functioned as a fill light to add a little dimension to the scene. So that's what I painted.