Happy October everyone. Figured I’d share where I’m at on this big painting of my overgrown yard. After a month or so, it finally dried enough for me to glaze a few color passes in. There’s something so satisfying about glazing color into a big monochrome painting like this. It really gets fun after a couple layers when the color really starts to pop and you get that depth in the shadows that you can only get through layering transparents. here’s a timelapse and still of the first pass:

I’ve been using mainly pthalo green and blue and muting them with Indian yellow, alizarin crimson, and quinacridone magenta, and tinting with payne’s gray. Using pthalo can be a dangerous game, but I find if you mute it and apply it thinly, you can get some really great effects. Here’s where I’m currently at with it after three passes.

I started painting the house parts with opaque paint the other night.

It’s in an ugly place at the moment where the paint is sinking, but it looked pretty good when I laid it in, so I should be able to get it back.

Once I get the house all dialed in, it’s gonna be all about just grinding on that foliage for a few weeks. I’m excited to dive into it. Its at a scale to where I can be pretty free and expressive with it, and I’m hoping that some really thick Impasted oil paint should add a lot the chaos of the vegetation.

While I was waiting for this to dry, I painted this 18×24 study to sort of gear up for this big one. Even though the lighting is completely different, the approach will be similar, building opaque paint on top of the glazed underpainting to refine and add details and texture.

here are a few closeups:

Lastly, I figure I’d show this drawing I made of my best bud Bob last week on his seventh birthday. He’s getting old, but he’s still pretty sharp. He’s got such a wild face..it’s so big, and with all that skin and these weirdly human eyes he’s so much fun to draw.  Doing it made me realize I should probably do portraits of all four of our pups for posterity now that they’re getting older.