30″ x 24″  framed

140 lb. watercolor paper

NFS

I was looking to do a bicycle painting that showed the bikes in more detail, but couldn’t find a picture in my albums that did just that. So I settled on an action shot of riders turning onto the final straightaway.

The blue is mostly indigo with a bit of van dyke brown to tone it down a bit. I had some problems with size and perspective as I made the initial pencil drawing that I never could seem to get right.

I’ll try again with a painting of riders coming right at you at the finish line. Maybe I won’t have to include as much bike detail.

Not For Sale

I painted this for our soon-to-be-born grandson. This goes along with “Family Portrait” which hangs in our granddaughter’s bedroom.

The San Francisco Hilton Tower just west of Union Square has five large stained glass windows showing scenes of San Franciso. I always wondered what they would look like in a Victorian house. This is a house that is parts of several houses I photographed and then combined parts to create the composition. The images in the stained glass windows are iconic images of the City by the Bay, one of our favorite cities to visit.

I had recently watched a short piece on Oregon Art Beat about artist Jhenna Quinn Lewis who specializes in Trompe L’oeil paintings. Trompe L’oeil is the technique of creating extremely realistic almost three dimensional imagery. I had tried something similar when I first started painting 6 years ago, but it wasn’t very good and I didn’t know I was attempting Trompe L’oeil.

The Collector is my attempt at Trompe L’oeil while integrating thin strips of tape to mask off areas I want to remain white. These strips represent string that give the painting a more three dimensional look.  Geoffrey McCormack, a friend and painter, has created some remarkable pieces using tape. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery as they say.

I thought about making the background black, but later got some good advice from my wife-muse that it might look better with a lighter color. So I decide to paint the background as wood. I found a great YouTube demonstration on painting wood in watercolors so off I went.

This entire painting took close to 20 hours. I did multi-layered washes for the wood and even added two more layers after I thought the painting was done. Some of the stamps are real stamps and others are ones I invented.

Favorite parts of the painting? The Duesenberg car stamp and the shadows of the white strings.

18″ x 24″ 140 lb. cold press paper
Framed $250

I painted a picture of three giraffes and two parrots for our granddaughter last spring. I liked the colorful birds and decided to try another painting of just parrots.

There were some reference photos, but the composition was created as I did the drawing. I wanted the birds to be high in the composition with enough room below to show their tails. The background was a bit of a struggle as I didn’t want to have it be too much of  a distraction; but at the same time I wanted the birds to appear in some context.
Actually my favorite part of the painting is the tree limb.

I took about 20 refererence photos early in the morning with the sun coming up. After some discussion with the owner we decided on this composition.

I took out some of the trees on the left that obscured much of the second floor of the house. Although I simplified a few things, the painting represents the charm of the home.

This is the fourth Harley-Davidson motorcycle I’ve painted. I love painting the chrome with all the highlights and contrast. This particular Harley was parked in bright sunlight near the University of Oregon Bookstore this summer. I took some snapshots for reference then forgot about them. This fall I was scanning through my photos and this one caught my eye.

This took about 3 hours to draw or maybe longer. It was a painstaking process but worth the time. When I spend a lot of time with the drawing, the resulting painting is usually better than if I rush things or trace a projected image (which I almost never do).

I started painting what I think are the exhaust pipes. The blue of the sky, black of buildings being reflected and the tan of the ground took multiple layers to get it  just right. I got a bit lost in this painting at times, but was able to recover to my own satisfaction. Part of the challenge was to understand what I was painting. Since I don’t know how a motorcycle works let alone a car, I wasn’t always sure what all the parts of the machine were or what they did.

In the end I was happy with the finished painting and the overall composition.

My grandfather was an avid golpher right up to the end of his life. When he died, I was given his clubs primarily because I was left-handed just like he was. The set was made up of Ben Hogan autographed clubs. The woods are actually made of wood.

Gramp was a short, fair-haired Irishman with a dry sense of humor. He would have appreciated that I did a painting of his clubs and then sold it to another golfer.

The most time  with this painting was spent painting the grass. I started with a light yellow-green and then progressed to darker and darker greens and finally a dark almost black green for the shadows.

$250 Framed

Chuck Taylor Converse basketball shoes first appeared in 1910. It has been 100 years and we’re still wearing ‘em.

I started by masking off all the laces and white stitching. I then did multiple layers of colors for the shoes both inside and out. Once I was satisfied with the color and contrast, I took the masking fluid off and began adding shadows to the laces to make them 3-dimensional. Finally I put shadows around the shoes.