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"

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

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

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"

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.

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.