Thursday, December 26, 2013

Merry Christmas

This one is from 2005, painted en plein air in oil in Toronto. Vancouver snowed a few days before, but it melted before Christmas. I don't think Christmas needs to be white, but we did go up to the mountain to play in the snow.
It's been 8 years since this was painted and I find myself still drawn to the same subject, and same excitement for subtlety in colours. If this was taken with a camera, I think it will be awfully boring, with dirty grey snow and unappealing single tone sky. Yet in painting, the snow are greys in shades of green, purple, blue, brown, and the same colours are echoed everywhere to form a harmonized painting. To me, painting is magical in the sense that it has the power to transform a view into a poetic interpretation.

"The green lane" 9.5" x 12.5" - 2005

(Update) Wait, I actually found a photo of the similar lighting condition, not sure if it's taken on the same day.

This is the same view, but different day.


I was so drawn to the back allies in Toronto. They were so full of character, and I like how they are so organic, almost blending into the nature, creating so much energy in light and shadow, either hard or soft.
Some other views that are still so inspiring to me, and remind me of my painting crazed university life. I used to carry my french easel to school almost everyday, and walked around the neighborhood near the school to find my next subject in -10C weather. When I finished school, I think I had visited all the areas that were walkable and painting-friendly.



Thursday, December 19, 2013

Cory painting

Cory - 8.5" x 6.5" - 2013 08 16

Cory joined our painting group at lunch. He is painting on his iPad using a stylus.
I ran out of time to do the hands. I like to paint hands because they are very expressive and full of character.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Value

 A few months ago I went to a talk by Nathan Fowkes. He is a concept artist and painter and designs light and color for feature animations. He paints en plein air and draws his color inspiration from nature. He brought to the talk some of his sketch books, and I particularly liked his thumb size paintings, where all details are not present, except the most essential elements to form a painting, very abstract. I have painted en plein air for many years, but have never really seen a fellow artists paintings up close, and they were so inspiring.
In the talk he talked about the importance of value, it being the foundation of any painting, if the values are wrong in a painting, no colours can save it. He uses a Photoshop filter to demonstrate taking a detailed painting and removing its details and turning it into a blocky image with only the tonal values, it was easy to see what makes an image successful.
It's always the topic in every art book about the importance of value, I knew about it, I use it to evaluate my work at my job, but in my paintings? When I do a painting it's usually because I am inspired by the colours, painting a grey scale painting felt like a school chore. But I had been painting a couple dozen paintings of the same view outside the work window, I wanted to do something different, so I did one in grey scale after the talk.

8.5" x 6.5" - 2003 Aug. 13

To my surprise, it was so much fun! I also learned a lot from doing this painting. It forced me to only focus on the value, and the relative value of the different objects, and how they are different from each other. Not just that, it helps me to design/alter the image by separating the elements at different depth using value: popping the little people on the bright street, and making sure the building is darker than the tree near the bottom.

If I had painted this in colour I would have been more concerned about the colour accuracy and probably not whether the final colour has the proper value. I believe if one can do enough of these value studies and train himself to pay good attention to value in his paintings, it will make the colour paintings so much stronger.

The view from the lounge:



Friday, November 22, 2013

Last one before the frost

This one was done before I had to go back to work after 3 months at home. The light was pretty soft and even, nothing dramatic, but I liked how it evenly shaped the trees and bushes and I wanted to capture this calm lazy autumn day.
Execution wise, I am still struggling with using pastel on square geometric shapes, without making them look amateurish. To show the volume and the nature of each bush is another challenge. I was not able to put layer on layer without smearing the bottom one, maybe fixing each layer with a spray before moving on to the next is a solution?

2013 11 11 - 6.5" x 8.5"

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Quick one from Bowen Islannd

I finally visited Bowen Island on my friend's invitation. We went to the dock to do some painting with the family. It was a typical Vancouver weather in the fall, but it wasn't raining and there was some colours in the sky. The dock was moving up and down with the wakes and I got sick quickly. It was also cold on the bare hands, anyway all the typical challenges with plein air painting, and the baby was crying. I ended up with just one painting, but the scenery was so serene I would have liked to do a couple more.
I need some darker greens and a dark brown grey. I couldn't get the shadowed part of the trees darker without adding black, but I didn't want it to look dirty so I had to leave it as is.

2013 11 10 - 6.5" x 8.5"


The view


Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Creating complexity in a painting

This is one of my favorites so far, because to me if feels like a moody and poetic painting. I think there's a few reasons for that.
1) This painting was not finished to the extend I normally do, because I painted it during lunch hour at work and I painted this one slowly and did not have time to paint all the details.
2) The hard and soft edges used in various places: If a painting only has either hard or soft edges it can be boring. Painting is not photography, you don't have to have all hard silhouettes. In this case, I tried to create that in many lines, such as where the sky and the mountain meets; from the dock to the water; from the water to the foreground; and in the trees.
3) The different textures, smooth and rough. This result comes naturally from my painting process. I tend to block in big masses to establish the composition and tonal arrangement first, then I would smear out all the pastel marks on the paper, so they sink into the paper and become more stable, so I can paint more layers on top. When I make a new mark over the underpainting, I don't usually smear it, because it would mix with the underpainting and is undesirable. I like to make bolder and thicker strokes, or sometimes rubbing the side of the pastel stick on the paper to create textures. The top layers do not cover up all the underpainting, and this create this interlocking look, such as in the foreground, the trees, the water and the sky.

These elements together result in a painting that has more visual interests, with more variations in terms of how the paint/powders register on the paper.

2013 04 02 - 6.5" x 8.5"


The view

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Evening clouds looking west

This is from a couple days ago. For the hour before I started to paint this, I had been looking at the sun go down and colours get more vibrant and the urge to paint was getting stronger. I was holding my baby son at that time, all of  sudden the urge was too strong to contain, I went over to my wife, and later she said I literally dropped the baby on her, and said: "I have to paint."  I quickly went to my supplies and started to set up as fast as I could. During the magic hours, the colours are changing by the minute. Once I did a block in, I took a photograph before the view completely changed. When the sky became too different, I put the photo up on my laptop and finished the painting from there.


2013 11 03 - 6.5" x 8.5"

Sunday, November 03, 2013

Why I like painting

Painting is such an art of abstraction. This is from last night looking north east at the Brendwood mall sky station. I especially like plein air painting because the nature of it, it is usually done in a short period of time due to changing lighting conditions and weather and the scale tends to be smaller. This also steers the artists to be more loose, to just capture the essence. The resulting image is often a more abstract interpretation..
This painting is mostly made of dots and smaller shapes. Since the view was so dark, I couldn't really see the shapes of the buildings well, all I could do was to try to paint how the lights fall and reveal them. This resulted in many shapes of colours that ultimately form a recognizable image.
This is actually how I like to approach painting. Instead of seeing a tree as a tree, a building as a building, I like to just focus on the basics of it, the shapes, value, hue, saturation... Once you complete these shapes with the proper colours, the whole image will come together giving that the composition is solid.
In painting, I could rearrange placements and exaggerate colours as well. In this view, that big tall street light was in the middle of the frame, I moved it a little to the left. The sky was a subtle purple, I used a more saturated purple to complement the warm night scape.

2013 11 02 - 6.5" x 8.5"  "Brentwood station under a purple sky"

Below is a photo of the view.As you can see there's not much details left, and it's a pretty unappealing image. But it's not to say photographs (especially snap shots) are useless for painting. In can be a really helpful aid if you know what information you need out of it.




I took the photo and processed it on the computer. Since I shot RAW, there's a lot of information in the pixels that I could bring back. Below is the processed image, I lifted the blacks, and brought down the high lights, and increased the exposure. Overall, I took the steps to make it more close to how my eyes saw the scene, and the processed image looks a lot closer to what I painted, it also has a much more painterly feel.




In this painting, I didn't use the photo to paint, but if I were to make a larger studio piece of this painting, I would use this photo to get a much more accurate drawing and details, and use my painting for color and value reference.

Friday, November 01, 2013

Paper color

With oil painting, it's common for the painter to do an under painting first before the final image is painted. There are different types of under painting. One type is just a general wash imprimatura, basically tinting the canvas a color. Another type is a more descriptive painting, but just large shapes to define the overall value composition. There is another type that is a pretty detailed monochromatic painting of the final image, it's usually for a highly realistic painting.

In pastel, usually the painter doesn't tint the whole image with powders to tint it, because it's hard to work over that, so pastel papers come in many different colors for this purpose. There are however pastel painters who use the pastels for big shapes and then do a water wash on the whole paper, since pastel is water soluble it creates this water colour under painting. Kitty Wallis does great work using this technique.

On top of choosing a tinted paper, I also do another large shape under painting to layout the composition. Since I find drawing out the image before painting is really tedious, this method suits me really well.

In this painting I picked a gray blue paper. It was the end of spring and it turned out to work really well for this damp and wet day.


2013 04 30 - 6.5" x 8.5


I used a creamy yellow paper for this painting to give it a warm feel.

2013 04 10 - 6.5" x 8.5"
After painting many paintings using coloured paper, I wanted to go back to neutral lighter white, since I find using colour papers can sometimes be really frustrating because it's hard to render the more accurate colour if the pastel does not have very good covering powder or you want the paint to be thinner. These 2 paintings are done using the near white papers.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Different seasons

One thing I like about painting from the same spot over a period of time is that you get to paint the same thing in different seasons. The first painting was done in late winter, the leaves on the trees were dead and brown. It's also in the rain season, so there's a big pool of water under the trees.

2013 02 13 - 6.5" x 8.5"


The second one was done 2 months later when the new leaves were coming out. It's also drier and more sunny.

2013 04 16 - 6.5" x 8.5

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Foggy night

Another night time one. This was painted from my living room. It was night time and foggy. I liked how the gray purple sky complimented the warm orangy street lights. I had to turn off all the lights in the house, because with the lights on it'd reflect the interior on the window and I wouldn't be able to see out properly. Like the other post Nocturne, I wasn't able to judge the colors on the paper. I finished the painting and turned on the light and the sky was green! So I fixed it with the lights on, but I think if I want to do more of these night time painting it might be a good idea to invest one of those little LED head lights.
Overall I think I should have started with black paper instead of this gray one, it made the darks too bright. Also, the orange light area  are a little too desaturated; the right side tree should also have a sharper silhouette.


2013 10 18 - 6.5" x 8.5

Friday, October 18, 2013

Mixing in pastel

Pastel is a new medium to me, so I am still experimenting with different techniques. Both paintings were done a week apart, on similar neutral lighter tone paper, and somewhat similar lighting conditions. Both had lighting poking through the clouds, except that the first one was mostly cloudy.
In the first one, for the sun light on the mountain, I mixed the color on the paper, to create this yellow green color.
I find mixing with pastel extremely difficult. I only have about 60 colours, apparently that's plenty for pastel, but mixing on paper is very different from mixing on a palette like oil or watercolor. Mixing on paper, if the sun light falls on 10 different spots in the painting, for each of the spot I have to mix to create the same color, and it's ok with bigger spots, but when the spots are tiny, mixing becomes nearly impossible. Also, mixing on paper is very difficult for atmospheric affect. Say there's a red house on the mountain that's nearest to us, and one on the mountain at the middle distance, and one farthest. The 3 houses, though all red, will all appear different depending on the atmosphere. The farther it is away from the viewer, the bluer, or grayer, and lighter it can appear. It is quite easy with oil, on the palette, you just add a little neutral gray to desaturated it, add a little blue or purple to tint it, add a little white to lighten it, and then you dab it on the canvas, and it's a perfect colour and any size you want. With pastel, unless I have the exact desaturated bluish red, I don't know where to begin to mix a perfect colour on such a small area. Maybe working big is the solution, or buying more colours, but coming from an oil background, where I could paint most things with 5-6 tubes of paint, it is extremely frustrating.

2013_06_11 - 6.5" x 8.5"

This one below was done a week later. Instead of mixing, I layers another colour on top. This approach is more direct, but so far has only worked for me in a few cases.

2013_06_18 - 6.5" x 8.5"


I am still painting with pastel, because it's easy to set up and clean, and it doesn't make an oily aftermath like oil; I could use it while at work. I do want to learn more about pastels, as it helped me pick up painting again.

The view for the 2nd one:

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Sea bus

This painting I like for the composition.
In a studio painting, it's much easier to add a person here, and car or a bird here and there. In plein-air painting it's harder, because they never stay still. You have to use your short term memory quite well, and put down the large shapes very quickly. This is the sea bus leaving downtown Vancouver for North Shore. I didn't think to add it in the painting until it started to move into my frame. I had a few seconds to decide where I want it, and quickly render it. I think this is also what's great about plein air painting because lots of unexpected can happen.

2013 03 26 - 6.5" x 8.5"

This is one of the earlier pastels I did, and I was still using mostly dark paper so I don't have to put a lot of darker pigments on the paper and make the lighter tones dirty, but I feel like the dark paper tone is too strong here and push through the thin layer of pastel, and give the whole painting a aged/dusty oil varnish look. It also make the colours appear less saturated. So if you use dark paper without pastels with strong covering power, it can tint your whole painting and give it a color effect.

My pastel is the Gallery 60 color set. It's a cheap set (I think about $60?). Some sticks are very hard you cannot make it stick on the paper, it just scratches it. Some sticks are softer but they are quite thin. Maybe in the future I will try other kinds of papers such as sandpaper that grips of lot more of the pastel and make it stick.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Giant pine tree

I just moved into our new place 2 weeks ago, yesterday I finally found the time and ambition to do my first painting from the new home. I sat down in my room, set up, and started to paint, and it was horrible. It was so frustrating, I couldn't get any colours right. I will do another post talking about my current woes with this medium Anyway, it looked really bad. I took it to the bedroom, my wife was taking a nap with our baby boy. I shoved it in front of her face and said: "Ugly, I quit pastel." She opened one eye, and said: "Just try again.", and went back to her sleep. Being world's best husband I was, I went to the living room and did one from that angle, the sun was setting, hitting the top of the trees and the far away highrise, the sumac is changing into its fall color...
If you can't tell yet, I quite like the result, and I am going to do another pastel .

2013 Oct 14 - 6.5" x 8.5"

Now, composition, if your eyebrows are hitting the ceiling, yes, I am aware, even my wife asked me what I think. What I think is, I don't know. Yes, there's a giant pine tree in the middle on the frame, splitting the painting in half, but the painting is quite balance in its own way, and I am going to keep it for now, until 3 years later I look back at my past work, and say "What was I thinking!!!!???"

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Nocturne

I have always wanted to do a night time painting, since I saw the Nocturne series from James Whistler. In the paintings, you will see a pretty limited gamut, due to our eyes not being able to distinguish many hues in the dark. Also in this paintings there are many soft edge which I experienced in this painting as well. You can see I smeared the silhouette between the sky and the mountain.
This painting was a lot of fun to work with. I started with a black paper, and put in the sky first, and that defined the mountains as well. Where I painted there wasn't much light, so I actually couldn't quite tell what colours I was putting down, such as the green train cargo, it was supposed to be blue.
I really hope I will find the time to do more of these.

2012 Nov. - 6.5" x 8.5"


Marc Hanson did a series of Nocturne paintings, they are amazing, check them out.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Crab park

This is painted around the same time as Wet Parking lot. At this time I have started to move away from my "paint-by-number" approach (will show examples in the future, maybe) and adopted my oil painting methods.
In oil painting we follow the rule "fat over lean". Fat is basically paint un-diluted, so paint directly from the tube. Lean is thin paint, paint diluted by mineral spirits such as turpentine. Fat over lean is not just a conservation technique to prevent cracking, it also provides structure to a painting. If you apply the same brushstroke, same size brush, same thickness of paint everywhere on the canvas, the painting can look uninteresting. Using fat over lean, I'd dilute my darks, and use it to block in the paint, create large masses, establish composition, before I slowly introduce white and less the amount of solvent. Thinner paint gives a more fluid and streaky look and thick paint is bolder and and textural.
When I transferred the thinking to pastel painting, I find in many ways it works. And I love to use dark pastel stick to quickly block in the composition, instead of doing a line drawing first and then fill in the color. I find this process is much more natural, organic and the shapes blend so much better since they are not "confined" in lines.

2013 Jan. - 6" x 8.5"

Here is a close up. Click on it to enlarge.




Wet parking lot

This is the view from 4th floor at work looking north at the Vancouver Habour and the North Shore mountain in the back. In the foreground is a parking lot next to Crab park. At work we have gone there to play baseball and bocci a couple times.

I live in Vancouver, and Vancouver has a wet season. It's not uncommon that during the winter a whole month could be raining, and it's not just drizzle or periodic rain, it's down pour pretty much 24/7. My painting buddies and I at work also tend to paint around lunch time, so the view/weather/time of day can stay pretty similar for all the paintings.

Around the time I did that painting I was using mostly dark paper. Since I was just starting out I was trying out different shade/color papers to see how they affect the painting. In this case I think the dark paper works well in creating the contrast to show off a wet parking lot


2013 Jan. winter 6" x 8.5"

Office space

My workplace has just announced that they are closing their door and all its 100 employees are being laid off. I think it's appropriate for me to post a painting I did of the work space as I will have very fond memories of this place.
This is my only interior pastel painting so far. I did it just after they have finished putting in this new bar just around the corner from my cubicle. And YES, it's an open bar every single day at work.

The new bar! 6" x 8.5" - 2013 May

So I was getting tired painting the same mountain view from the 4th floor (you will see why as I keep posting), I was walking around the office looking for a new angle, and this caught my eye. I loved the reflection on the floor and the soft light coming in from the windows. I had John Sargent's "Venetian Interior" in mind as I painted this.

John Singer Sargent - Venetian Interior
Today at work, a colleague came up to me and mentioned that this painting has an emotional impact on him. I was glad to hear that, because everyone appreciates a painting with different reasons, and it's great to know that one painting can mean something to someone else.

For more photos of the workspace
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/your-business/inside-pixar-canadas-offices
http://www.thepixarpodcast.com/58


Thursday, October 10, 2013

How it all began?

The main reason for this blog is for me to have a place to share my art work. I have had a website for years, but it's mostly set up as a job searching device, it's my portfolio site. I hope with this blog I can be more personal with the posts. I also like that each post can have its comment section, it'd be great to hear what the viewers have to say about the work.

As the first post, I want to talk a bit about my painting background, how I started and where I am now.

I love oil as a medium. In high school, I tried out acrylics, and I didn't like how it would lose it's saturation and shine after the paint dries. When I was in university, I finally and got myself a set of oil supplies, and I still remember the first stroke I put down on canvas, I was in awe of the tackiness and the textural quality, I almost yelled out loud that this is the kind of texture in Van Gogh's paintings! My first oil paintings, were all examples of my new found love for this texture, and they all resemble some kind of porcupines and would draw blood if you dare to touch them. I was so inspired by Van Gogh and Group of Seven I painted in their styles:
Plein air - 2003
After Tom Thomson - 9" x 12" - 2003


However, I paint more and more, my style in oil tamed a lot. I was much more interested in seeing the texture from thin paint. I gessoed all of my supports in many layers, whether it be canvas or wood board, I sanded them after the gesso dried, to ensure a smooth surface. I loved to apply the first layers, which were usually the darks, heavily diluted in mineral spirits. I was able to create texture not from the thickness of paint but its fluidity.

Three Sparrows - 35" x 30" -  2005

After university, I stopped painting. I went on for more schooling and ended up in the animation indistry, and it is a perfect commercial art industry. My profession is aI Lighting artist. I use lights on the CG characters and enviroments to give it a time, a season, a climate, a mood and to support the story. It's almost like painting, except that it's very technical.  Artistically, I was very satisfied, but every time  I looked at an awesome painting I would wish that I had painted that, the urge to paint just got stronger and stronger, but I still was not motivated enough, there was always some reason. Eventually I landed a great job at a great company who wanted to see their employees grow, I was surrounded by other great artist. There's a pastel artist named Bill Cone in our California headquarter who worked with us on our first project, I got to see some of his work, and I had never seen any pastel painting to his caliber. There were a couple colleague who attended a demo by Bill when he came to our studio for a visit before I started to work there, we decided to give pastel painting a try, and we went to the 4th floor lounge during lunch time and this was my first pastel painting and my first painting in 5 years!

2010 November, first painting in 5 years !

We used the left over pastel sets from Bill's demo. I didn't find out until later they were the very high quality Ludwig hand made pastels. I was very happy to do a painting after a long gap, but pastel didn't blow my away the way oil did, and so I didn't paint again for another 2 years (gasp)

2012 winter. - 7.5" x 9.5"


I have never liked pastel paintings before I saw Bill Cone's work. The pastel paintings I had seen were mostly floral + pets paintings done by hobbyists and I never saw a painting that impressed me, so I kind of put the medium aside as a choice for people who aren't too serious with painting.

2 years later, I don't know what got into me, maybe it's the art supply spending allowance from work, I bought myself a beginner 60 color pastel set, and persuaded the same 2 colleagues and we'd meet up once a week during lunch time to paint and we did that for the next year. Over the next little while I will post the more than 30 paintings I have done during that period, well, maybe I won't post the very bad ones.
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