The Grandgirls: Sisters

 

d) The final cut. Took ages to come back to and finish. Still a bit tight, but working on freeing up more with three new ones I've started. 

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I wanted to be able to paint a picture in a day - here is its progress from early this morning.

I am hoping to complete it by tonight. My aim is to free up how I apply paint and capture more of the essence and feel of the subject, whilst in portraits at least, still maintaining a good likeness. 

I am pleased with how this one is working. Sometimes things come together unexpectedly. 

Sisters, acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 30cm (Started 27-11-2015)

a) 

b) 

c)

When the Cows Come Home No.2

I was not happy with the original composition of my cows painting; the tree I put in at the last minute, which is actually in the real scene, just broke it up and stopped the flow of the lines - bands - of colour. I scratched the tree out the other day, painted over it, and painted the first poor cow's head back in, like I originally had it. 
Sometimes you just need to do something, look at it for a while and then change it. I'm a lot happier with it now. Still a bit tight, but working on that...

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I started this one 2 weekends ago while painting "The Picnic / Walk' (see previous post) which I am going to leave now for a while as I it seems I have come to a bit of an impasse with how to tie the background in with the figures.
In this painting I wanted to be able to say "...And here's one I did today!" But it went on a bit longer than that. It is an experiment in freedom and loosness (so to speak), which succeeded to some degree, but still is a bit 'tight' and more realistic than I'd hoped, with me trying (to hard?) to balance detail with more abstract qualities, like bands of colour and shapes. I think I need to try another one using the same subject matter, and concentrate on colour and shapes more, this time working on a larger scale - and not think about it so much. I'm still happy enough with it - the colours kind of work well.

It is only about 18cm x 12cm. Most of my posted recent work is around this size.

At the moment I am trying to make my leaky, no-walled, non-possum-proof shed into a studio of sorts so I can work on larger scale pieces, instead of only working in my smaller indoor space. So here's hoping my next painting is bigger and looser and freer!
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Here are some close ups of some of the figures from the previous painting, which I will leave on the back burner for now.

My lack of camera skills have left these all looking a bit blurred!