California Sunset

Who doesn't love a California sunset? I was inspired in the moment to paint this from the back deck of my home. I had a red-orange ground prepainted with acrylic in my pad. I mixed some cool gray for the clouds and rooftops. I layered on yellow and my warm greens, hoping to dull or paint over the orange entirely. That didn't quite happen before sundown–the light changes fast–resulting in an underpainting that is so hot it's burning up. It's a neat effect, but not at all what I intended.

Watercolor Painting: Autumn Light

California is graced with unusually warm Fall weather. Now that we're in the midst of a cold and rainy winter, I'm looking back on this painting from November and realizing how lucky I was. As the leaves change color, and the days get shorter, the temperature around 4:00 pm rarely drops below 50°F. This is great, because I'm able to capture the beautiful autumn light with big color washes that dry in under 20 minutes. Warmer weather means faster drying times. Furthermore, the golden hour window is approximately 30 minutes (between 4 and 4:30). After that, I have to stop. The light is completely different.

Check out the animated gif below!

Landscape Painting: Tilden Park

This is an acrylic painting from "Inspiration Point" in Tilden Park in Berkeley, California. Aptly named, it's a beautiful view to say the least on a very warm Fall day with a clear view of the bay and the Marin County shoreline in the distance. I was really happy with how this turned out.

San Pablo Reservoir Watercolor

I wanted to provide some information for those of you who are interesting my process. Once you start painting, you realize that getting there is half the fun. I typically paint with a buddy, setting aside about 3 hours which includes driving to a nearby location, finding a comfortable spot to paint, setting up, painting for an hour and a half to two hours, talking and drinking coffee, and packing up and going home.

In the painting of the San Pablo Reservoir (below), it was early afternoon, but the sun was already very low because it's winter in North America, creating some really nice contrast naturally. I always look for naturally occurring color and/or value contrast.

The underpainting was roughed in with thinned Cad Yellow and Prussian Blue. Working from light to dark, I added dark green. I mix my own greens, with Cad Yellow, Prussian Blue and Sepia. I added little red accents to the foliage in the lower left to break up the strict green/blue palette. Lastly I painted back in the shadow areas with Permanent Red and Sky Blue gouache (light over dark). Then I painted the bark detail on the light side of the tree with thinned white gouache (light over dark).

Watercolor Paintings

I'm taking a break from traditional sketching this summer to learn more about painting. It requires the same skills (composition, simplifying forms, value contrast) with the added challenges of mixing wet media, understanding drying times, and color contrast.

These were all done in Burlingame, California at various times of the day.

Carolands Gate House

I took the plunge into the world of Plein Air recently. This is an 8x10 oil on hardboard. It's pretty rough. This is really my first oil ever. It's going to take a lot of practice to get good at this.

On another note, somebody called the cops on me and my friend. The citizens of Hillsborough sent a clear message. Oil painting of historical buildings which happen to be near elementary schools will NOT be tolerated. Anyway, here is my friend Brandon Jones's digital painting from that morning.

Costa Rica Afternoon Painting

The sun was just about to set over the hill directly in front of me. It was mostly blocked by the tree, but I was sort of blinded for 20 minutes. I did a little touch up afterwards. Darkening everything and then adding highlights. Anyhow, for a quick painting it captures mostly all of the forms and the lighting pretty accurately.

Costa Rica Jungle Painting

Hey Followers. Here's some new jungle action from Costa Rica. It's a preeeety quick painting. About an hour and a half. It's a real life study. And only the essential information. Not a very interesting composition though. What do you think?

Costa Rica Digital Plein Air Painting

I started with a sketch this time. Spent a bit more time on the initial sketch than usual. It resulted in a much tighter painting, which I like, with more accurate perspective and clearly overlapping shapes.

I spent about 1 hour on the painting–trying to capture the light before it changed–then spent about another hour touching up gaps and stuff.

Costa Rica: Study of Mountains and Clouds

A couple of hours spent outside watching the mountains and clouds. The clouds were big and puffy when I sat down like this.

This is about a half hour later. A little different.

I took a break and came back to the same painting. The puffy clouds turned into thin strips.

Burlingame Train Station

This is a digital plein air done in Photoshop on a Macbook Pro 15". I used a black Shade Box based on this design from The Digital Plein Air Society. It's still ridiculously hard to paint from life.

The glare on my Macbook was so damn bright, even with the Shade Box, that I didn't realize how dull the color was until I got back to the office. I had to lower the brightness and increase the contrast to make this look half decent.

Petaluma Valley Digital Plein Air

I brought the Cintiq to Petaluma for some quick digital plein air painting. The view from my parents' porch.