Vermilion Cloud

Watercolor and gouache on aquaboard, 5″ x 7″

I have this one photo of a cloud with the morning light on it that’s very similar to this, but not exactly the same, and I wanted to paint something like that. I was especially impressed with how this cloud was dark, which made it stand out from the lighter higher altitude clouds behind it, and had such strong vermilion highlights under it from the sun. That really made it stand out in the sky. The cliffs and trees are made up though, as the original photo had the roofs of houses at the bottom instead.

This was painted on aquaboard, which is like gesso board but made for watermedia. It’s been a long time since I’ve used aquaboard for anything, but it has its advantages. Like Yupo, it’s very easy to rewet and wipe dried paint off of it, but quite not as easily as Yupo can. The palette is the new weekly theme that I posted on Instagram here a couple of days ago. Only the cerulean is gouache, the rest is watercolor. The reason for using gouache for the cerulean is because both of my tubes of cerulean watercolor are experiencing a lot of binder separation, which often happens with cerulean, and it was faster to just use this gouache to fill that role on the palette. It’s very similar, but more opaque.

Table Mountain Sunset

Casein on bristol board 8.5″ x 5.5″

The water was the most difficult part of this because I was in a rush and it seemed like nothing I did got the color right. This was painted entirely with a da Vinci CosmoTop spin pointed filbert, size 8. Photo reference from Louise Petrick of Paint my Photo.

Also, there was a notice today that I signed up for WordPress 6 years ago today. My first actual post was in July, 5 years ago, and I don’t remember there being a long period of not posting after signing up, but that’s what the notice claims.

After the Thunderstorm, after Arkhip Kuindzhi

Oil on canvas, 10″ x 8″

I made a rough copy of a painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi.

The blue is a mix of ultramarine that I made myself with some titanium white and a little transparent red oxide for the areas with more grey. I used a few drops of burnt plate oil when making it, which is linseed oil that’s been heated to the point of combustion and left like that until half the volume is left. Adjustments to the amount of heat and length of time produces a range of different results. It’s thick and normally used in printmaking, but I read a theory that Rembrandt (who was also a printmaker) may have added some of it to his paint to get the effects he did. The paint I made was very interesting and could be called stringy or ropey. Very different from normal ultramarine from a tube.

Red Streaked Sky

I took this photo of the sunrise a couple of weeks ago. Even though the red is such a strong color I think it feels like a very gentle scene.

Night Sky

Oil on canvas, 5″ x 7″

This is my favorite constellation. Maybe that’s because it’s the only one I can find on my own without help, but it’s still my favorite. Do you recognize it?

Originally I had painted a shooting star too, but then I realized it was hitting him in the crotch. Whoops~

All of the stars I painted are real stars from my book on constellations, though I might be slightly off with the placement of each one relative to the others. The top left star is Betelgeuse and the bright one at the bottom right is Rigel.

The black that I used for this is one I made myself using Iron Oxide Black 306 Bluish from Kremer Pigments. It seems like a good black to use if I were to ever paint something with a Zorn palette.

Evanescence of Day

Oil on canvas, 5″ x 7″

The last faint sliver of day, just as it reaches the edge of vanishing.

I started this many months ago but the color choices weren’t looking right and I set it aside. Then today I decided to completely paint over it with new colors. It’s still the same painting though, just different paints and finished details. All of the paints I used in the top layer are from Williamsburg. I used Van Dyke brown, French terre verte, Italian Pompeii red, ultramarine blue, and titanium White. Also there’s generous amounts of a putty medium that I made yesterday and put in a tube. I think all the paint visible here is mixed with around 50% putty.

Red Sunset

Acrylic on canvas, 5″ x 7″

I painted this with a set of acrylic paints that my landlord bought for me, so I’m going to give this to him. It’s been a long time since I’ve used acrylic but I think it worked out pretty well.

Cloud Photos

Here’s a few old photos I took while on a plane and thought were interesting. In the one above we were flying into and among clouds near evening.

Huh? A hole in the clouds?

Red Sunrise

Oil on canvas, 8″ x 10″

I was looking at Yellow and Gold by Mark Rothko yesterday and I thought I’d like to paint something like it, but… I figured it could use a few mountains. 🙂

I used three recently gotten paints that I haven’t used on anything yet, plus white. Transparent yellow medium (PY128, Rembrandt), Indian yellow (PY83, Michael Harding), and pink madder (PR221, Holbein). All three of them are very transparent paints. The sky is a mix of the two yellows and the mountains are a mix of Indian yellow and pink madder. I was really impressed with the reds and oranges that I got from that. The reddest area is an extremely intense vermilion but very transparent.

It was hard getting a good photo and I ended up doing a little editing to it and combining two different photos. In the real painting the sky is a little more yellow and isn’t quite so blended together, being more bands of color. The reds of the mountains are actually not far off from how they really look, but the brushstrokes aren’t really showing up. One of these days I need to either figure out my camera better or get a better lighting setup than just going outside into the sunlight…

Victoria Harbour Sunset

These are old photos from 2008. At the time my family and I were living in Korea on a 90 day visa. When it was getting close to running out for my mom and I we were considering taking a ferry to Fukuoka in Japan, staying there a couple of days, and then returning for another 90 days. I found so little information about the ferries available in English though that I was nervous about the idea of traveling a long distance to a city on the coast that I had never been to and then trying to figure out where the ferry would be without getting lost. Instead, we flew to Hong Kong because I at least knew how to get the airport.

We were only there for less than 3 whole days before going back to Korea, but it was a lot of fun. We took the ferry in the photo above on a tour of the harbor and were within walking distance of the art museum, a planetarium, restaurants, and a lot of other nice places.