Friday, July 31, 2015

Small Figure Workout


From Photos
Restraints: 
- use of only one brush (flat, half inch wide)
- no carving out (not allowed to repaint the backround over the figure)

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Brad Who?


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Copyright: whoever, not me. NFS

Lu at a Glance


30 cm x 50 cm, Oil, Studio

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Downtown BBQ


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair in Mannheim

Friday, July 24, 2015

Beneath Weinbiet


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Study of a Jeremy Mann master painting


30 cm x 50 cm, Oil, Copyright: Jeremy Mann.

Did you just mention Monet again??? Ok, let's play this out!

You say Monet. I say Mann. I won!
You say van Gogh, I say Zbukvic. I won!
You say Vermeer...
Yawn. Hey listen, I liked Chopin but in the meantime even the Beegees don't get me any more. I am up for something new!

You say Sargent. Ooops, you won!



Thursday, July 23, 2015

Lucky moment




Maybe you can imagine that for a startup painter it is quite hard to start up on the selling part of the game... Today is a great day for me on that part, a day i won't forget... Lucky enough a gallerist invited me to bring a view pieces to choose from... 
I went there yesterday, bringing 18 pieces with me... to my surprise he took them all. Today he wrote me that 5 are sold. Hey everyone, keep in mind that lucky moments are rare and need to be celebrated accordingly! :-)

Galerie Lauth
Mundenheimer Stasse 252
67061 Ludwigshafen


https://www.galerie-lauth.de

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

A Miss and the Aftermath



The upper picture shows what I painted today - a desaster of chalkiness. So I stopped it there and played with photoshop to learn what changes would make the painting look more acceptable... Higher color temperature, higher saturation, lower darks.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Friday, July 17, 2015

Not Quite Pisa


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

An hour color study near using the last rays of the day. Quick and loose - so do not visit Böhl-Iggelheim just because you love leaning towers!

Hang out in L4


30 cm x 22.5 cm, Oil, Pleinair in Mannheim

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Ruppertsberger Evening Lights


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair near ...

Noon on Koller Island


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair... well, on Koller Island.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Digging in the Dirt


20 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair near Schifferstadt.

Often I paint next to my car with the radio on. Thought this song title fits quite well.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Study of another master piece by Colley Whisson


30 cm x 50 cm, Oil

Learning objective: Handling a large brush (flat, 5 cm wide). 
Copyright: Colley Whisson

Monday, July 13, 2015

Study of a master painting by Colley Whisson


30 cm x 22.5 cm, Oil

Done to learn sunlit greens. Copyright: Colley Whisson

Excursion into Green



I did some oil paint mixing charts this morning to learn about the greens. In the upper chart all colors have the same value and fading towards gray in each column. The yellow on the upper left is a mix of cadmium yellow medium and burnt umber, the blue on the left is coelin blue tinted with white and the greens in between were mixed from these two. The decrease of saturation downwards was obtained by adding a neutral gray.
What surprised me was the left column, which appears fairly green, not brownish. It doesn't come out quite as clear in this photo than in the original chart. So at lower saturations my color judgement "that's green" stretches much further towards the warm colors than I thought.



Even the indian yellow in the left column still appears slightly greenish, although I used a warmer gray to decrease saturation compared to the first color chart. 
To find a color observed in a landscape it is usually not necessary to know which exact mix of paints is used. In fact, most of the observed colors, especially the grays, can be mixed from a large number of  tube paint combinations. Matching a color is much of a try and error game using the paints one has on the palette... Lighter or darker, more saturated or less, warmer or colder. 
However, this game can go wrong when some of the observed colors are not within the mixable range of the paints on the palette. And I think this is exactly what happened to me in some of my paintings with fairly light greens. I often did not have a warm yellow on my palette and I tried to mix those warm greens from cad red and cad yellow, which did not give suffiently high saturation and looks chalky in relation to other colors matched more accurately. 
> So is all you are trying to say that one needs a warm yellow on the palette?
Yes :-)

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Hallo Berlin


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair


"Good color observation today but questionable whether you really needed to drive 20 kilometers for this"
    Mind your own business and come up with a title for it!
"Hallo Berlin"
    Haha, don't be silly. That has nothing to do with Berlin. So?
"Hallo Berlin"
    Forget that. Serious now.
"Hallo Berlin"
    SHUT UP!!!
.
.
.
Brain? 

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Pfälzer Gemüsegarten


25 cm x 25 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Friday, July 10, 2015

In Max Slevogts Territory 2


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair near Frankweiler, Deutsche Weinstrasse

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Speedworks 25 min



15 cm x 15 cm, Oil

Fruit Study


24 cm x 30 cm, Oil

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Brief Update


40 cm x 30 cm, Oil

You do not know Richard Robinson!?
Okay, a brief update:
Claude Monet died 1926, Pablo Picasso in 1973.
Richard Robinson (*1975) is a New Zealand painter.




A scene of the slabstick movie Naked Gun comes into my mind: famous singer Enrico Palazzo is shacked and has to watch police officer Frank singing the national anthym on tv, subtitled "Enrico Palazzo". Maybe Richard feels like Enrico seeing this :-D


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

An X of Heidelberg


Almost a third of my pleinair approaches result in failure - complete failure to be specific ;-)
I am not too unhappy with this ratio. Today I didn't manage to follow my original concept with the two towers being the focus of the painting. Also i started working on details too soon. I got confused and found myself working on different things simultaneously. Finally, in a moment of brilliant clarity I made two passionate strokes.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Evening Color Study


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Preps


30 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair Otterstädter Altrhein

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Energy Bar


25 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Luidpoldhafen 2


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

My second of the day brings me to about seven hours of painting at over 35 C. I'm born in July, i love it! A problem is the sunblocker though. The sweat carries it into the eyes where it burns quite good

Into the Heat


25 cm x 30 cm, Oil, Pleinair

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Festplatz Bad Dürkheim


30 cm x 40 cm, Oil, Pleinair

I did this one on streched canvas for a change. Confirmed: It does feel better for me to work on prepared wood...

Sibylle


33 cm x 33 cm, Oil, Pleinair

The wood board I painted on is 40 cm x 40 cm and I covered the edges with tape to obtain a passe-partout-like white canvas around the painting area.