For the month of March, I challenged myself to paint 30 6×8 landscapes using only a limited palette of Utrecht paints. I further limited myself to painting local landscapes from my own references. Going into this, I knew I would be challenged by my inability to paint convincing rocks and the very real struggle to…
Category: Landscape
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 4
Day 22. When I was first starting to paint, I would look up tutorials on how to paint clouds, rocks, flowers, etc. I would watch these highly specific tutorials and do my best to follow them and struggle anyway. Eventually I figured out that learning to paint and learning to paint a flower are one…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 3
Day 15. I’ve officially half way through this challenge. Only 15 paintings left. I’ve unfortunately hit a bit of a wall though. The last two paintings weren’t quite as good as I wanted them to be. They aren’t necessarily bad, but I can do better. With this painting specifically, I finished it but really wasn’t…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 2
Day 8. Painting these large rock faces has been interesting. I think I may even be starting to get the hang of it. If I think of it as more of an abstract and am really messy about mixing my colors with my brush I can get a large variety of color and textures. The…
Utrecht Color Theory Challenge – Week 1
Day 1 and I’m already struggling. The yellow has been pretty difficult to mix so far. The green created by mixing the yellow and blue was really gross. You can see it only in a tiny part of this painting behind the trees on the right on the distant mountainside. My main way of getting…
Utrecht Color Theory Landscape Challenge
This March I will be painting 30 landscapes in 30 days with a limited palette of Utrecht paints. It has been a few years since I’ve painted landscapes and I’m really excited to get back into it. This challenge also fits nicely into my goal this year of completing several 30-day challenges. I will be…
Canyonlands Painting in Oil – Part 5
I think I’m finally getting somewhere with this painting. Although, it still doesn’t look a whole lot different from the last two posts. I darkened the middle background with lots of purples and a little blue too. It appears to have receded a bit into the distance with that. I also worked on getting…
Canyonlands Painting in Oil – Part 4
I really put some time into this painting this last week, but unfortunately, it doesn’t really look a whole lot different than it did last week. When I was uploading the picture, I briefly confused it with last week’s progress shot. My plan next week is to go in and glaze over a lot…
Canyonlands Painting in Oil – Part 3
Thought I abandoned this one? Nope. I just took a little break from oils for the Inktober challenge. I feel like I’ve finally made some decent progress on this painting. I finally painted in the center part of the scene and then went ahead and repainted everything else while I was at it except…
Canyonlands Painting in Oil – Part 2
I haven’t made it very far on this painting yet. As usual, life has been busy and I haven’t been the diligent artist that takes makes time for art. I’m relatively happy with the rocks in the foreground so far, but I may move things around a bit still. I think there is maybe…
Canyonlands Painting in Oil – Part 1
I loved last week’s watercolor version of this painting so much that I decided to try it again in oil. This one will be a studio painting instead of plein air though. I don’t have any sort of set up for oil plein air, so I don’t think it would go…
Painting Field Trip to Canyonlands
This week I joined my oldest daughter on her class field trip to Canyonlands National Park. The school has a great “art coach” who goes out of his way to make art interesting for the kids and this field trip was entirely devoted to art. It was a 40 minute bus ride to the…