Utility boxes

I'm getting a start tonight on the studies for the 2 boxes at Wilshire and Normandie. 

Addendum

This is Teresa Sun's painting. Great lamp post in addition to a real background and foreground. Good Work!

Photos from Plein Air Sunday

Yesterday was the last Sunday of the month and we met on the grounds of LACMA to get in some fantastic painting. The weather was perfect and it was a relaxing and successful afternoon. I'm amazed at the work. Somehow I missed getting a photo of Teresa's painting but I'll add it when I see her on Tuesday.

Shana

A really beautiful painting in acrylic.

 Aishwarya

The building in the background is excellent in this as the grass in the foreground.

Denise

Great treatment of light and shadow in the foreground and good treatment of buildings in the background.

Elizabeth

I love this painting! Simple, great color and fluent.

Me

Getting ready for Plein Air Sunday

I did this quick demo in preparation for out next Sunday painting session. We talked about the principles of atmospheric perspective. The first rule is that contrast in value diminishes as things recede in the distance. So here I just painted three palm trees  that are lighter as they go back against the white background. Just the change in value makes it seem like the tree on the right is in back of the other two.

Another technique with trees is to pay attention to the negative space and a good technique is to paint the positive space like I did above, then come in and paint the trees again by looking at the negative space. This breaks up the tendency to do cartoon or repetitive trees from your head rather than from observation. SOmetimes you have to go back and forth from positive to negative to ge a tree that captures the actual gesture of what you are looking at.

Saturday Night at fresh stART

I participated in the fresh stART event last night at the Santa Monica Airport  and sold 8 paintings!!!!

It was a wonderful event and I'm not the only one to see lots of red dots next to my work. There was a big crowd of people who were buying art .

But I want to be a little serious about how important it is for artists to be able to find collectors who appreciated and collect their work. It really breathes life into the studio. I'm grateful.

And for all the plain air painters from Sunday,,,, I sold my little painting. I will post the pieces that were sold this afternoon.