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: