The top painting here is a post card sized picture of a mangrove swamp. I think it is based on a photo but really all my "based on photos stuff is rather loose! I like it though. I painted this one really fast too. It as some watercolor pencil in it in addition to watercolor. I do that sometimes and should probably note it when I do since this part of this website is mainly a sort of notebook for me to look at what I did right and what I did wrong...I like both of these paintings.
NOW, the below painting is one I really like. I think it is one of the better ones I have done. It is a 7 x 10 1/4 painting. It has very few things that annoy me and is very close to the actual photo--the lighting is different but I wanted it to be darker.
I also used watercolor pencil for some detail on the bromeliads. I love bromeliads and should paint more of them. The big one in the center here was a pain in the ass to paint. It was actually a larger and more crazy looking thing. When I painted it, and it looked very like the real one, it just didnt' look right. I scaled it down. I may give it another try since I like the image so much.
Some of my trees are getting more fanciful. Many of this first group of minimalist trees are horrible looking--I overpainted.
Here I knew when to stop. I kind of like this one--although I have to resist the urge to paint more on it because it isn't exactly right. You can see what I mean in the large picture below.
Yes, when I took the photo this is based on I intended it to be a cityscape since the tree is IN the city.
But a funny thing happened. I didn't FEEL like making it a city scape. IN part because I thought the color of the tree was enough. I didn't want ugly buildings and blurry cars in the background....cars and buildings which would be rendered in poor perspective.
I may, some day, do an oil version of this since I really like it. The photos are off though. the lighter one is too bright and the darker one too dark. Squint your eyes and imagine something in between.
This is based on a photo I took while out in the Everglades on a canoe with a couple of people complaining about my steering of the boat.
The representation is, obviously, not exact and, indeed the painting doesn't look like the scene in reality. But, to me, it captures something of the glades. I think it could have used one real big tree in the middle foreground...of course there was no such tree there.
There are a few ot
There are currently three paintings of gothicorns out there in the world by me. This is the first unnamed one. It is also probably the one that looks more like a pig than a horse.
I am assuming, of course, that your run of the mill gothicorn resembles a horse. This one is postcard sized. As I am fond of telling everyone "One day it will be worth as much a
This sort of cartoonish painting of a Florida prairie is one of my favorites. It is basically what I meant it to look like--ergo a favorite.
There is a larger version below as well. I think I like it because it actually reminds me of the places...even if the trees are of an indeterminate species even by my rather LOOSE standards.
The above paintings are postcard sized on the right and 7 x 10 1/4 on the left. The bottomc two are pines in the prairie. Pines don't grow in water though so the larger tree is a sort of pine/mangrove hybrid. My effort to paint mangroves continues.
The fall tree is one where I tried to not use SO much paint and the magnolia in the upper right corner is, yet another, attempt to capture a tree that grew next to my house when I was a kid. It is also the first larger sized painting I did
The last time I was in Florida I was out in the Everglades and I took photos of plants and some critters (I wish I had a better lens for photographing birds!).
I started painting some of these photos--more my impressions of them than actual attempts to duplicate the photos in any exact way. I do not excel at that sort of duplication obviously. The piece above is postcard sized, while the one below is, I think, 7 X 10 inches.
When I paint from photos, from now on, I will also post the photos. I cannot recall WHICH photos I used for these two. I also took a shot at doing some mangroves. THAT one really looks nothing like the photo but turned out, in my opinion, well.
I am judging these by progress and what I wanted them to look like more than anything else. I may try to do more realistic but tho
This tree was painted specifically for a Chilean. I was going to have a bottle of Pisco sitting by the tree but I thought maybe that would be obvious.
I purposefully did this differently than other paintings, blurring lines, applying and reapplying water to the paper to diffuse the details. MAINLY, however, I was trying to get perspective...which...as you may notice...I never did get.
But who cares about reality? I like how it looks anyway.
I don't have this painting anymore so I cannot take a better shot of it. I like it. It is blurry, fuzzy and very primitive. It is one of those paintings that maybe didn't turn out exactly as intended. I also really wanted to keep painting but decided to leave it be and not ruin it!
The second of the gothicorn.....
These are some recent tree paintings. I sort of like the sky in the dark sky prairie one. I sort of like the whole painting but only sort of. There is something cartoony about it that appeals to me. None of these are from anywhere but my head.
If There Were Trees On Mars was initially the product of extra paint. I painted the leftover orangeish paint on one side of the and the blueish on the other. It sat there for at least a week. The first thing I thought of was; "It looks like mars." But how do you paint anything on Mars? Hmmm What if there were trees on mars? You see my line of thinking.
If There Were Trees On Mars
The Gwendle Bug Tree is one I painted specifically for someone. I am not sure they wanted THIS specifically but this is what they are getting. I am painting stuff as practice and if I get anything good I make an effort to disseminate them outward!
Gwendle Bug Tree
Dark Sky Prairie
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