Colour Studies

I've had a busy month, unfortunately I don't really have any worthwhile artwork to show for all my extra hours but pretty certain I have learned an awful lot!

I have been reading a lot and digesting the views of others on the merits of wildlife art, especially those bloggers from the Society of Animal Artists and have come to my own conclusions from the points put forward. It's really made me look at my own work and see the areas where I want to change and a direction I want to follow, this has led me to study art history a lot more particularly those past artists I admire already but also to finding new ones. 

Amongst other things, I've also been exploring my own palette and playing around with some new colours, I'm therefore producing colour charts like those below, most colours are predictable to me but some are quite surprising and will feature in my work from now on. I've also been doing them with a palette knife which was fun but made me realise how clumsy I am with this particular device at the moment! 

I think sometimes you have to take a step back from what you are doing and ask yourself why you are producing what you are producing even if you have been painting professionally for a lot of years, the discussion by fellow bloggers the last few weeks about Wildlife Art has certainly done that for me!

New Painting - part 2!

Now I have come down from the high of visiting Paris and all it's wonderful paintings, I thought it about time to settle down and do some painting of my own!

I'm still working on the painting mentioned a couple of posts earlier but have moved it on a few stages. Here is the painting currently....

As I said in the last post, I wasn't sure how the burnt sienna background would pan out but I've got to admit I do like the warmth it has given me in the shadows, kind of works out for me although I will have to work to cover the cool highlights which will need quite a few layers.

I'm trying to keep the fluidity of my brushstrokes too, with varying degrees of success! Sometimes there is nothing for it other than to wipe out a few hours work if I start returning to my 'illustrative' ways, bit soul destroying sometimes but worth it in the end!

Below is a close up view of my 'looser' brushstrokes, only the first layer but I will make sure the later layers keep their fluidity.