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

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

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:

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.

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!!!!???"

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.

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.