Stone wall

This would be the second painting I am planing to send to India.

I took a few reference photos behind my work place. The beautiful stone retainer wall has always drawn me in.

As I finished painting the stones in, I realized, they looked like mosaic kitchen back-splash. Something I would love to have in my kitchen, but not so much in this painting. It looks flat.

I just painted a dark color over the back splash and went over it again with palette knife this time. Now I feel that one can get a sense that the wall is leaning backwards and the large stones are almost stacked on top of each other. I also desided to make the side wall curve up to the right as in the actual photo.  I was struggling with the grass on the side. 

I started using my M. Grahm paints and went a little overboard with painting the lines as you can see above. However, once it was done it started looking a little too childlike/unrealistic. 

Sept 17, 2013:

I changed to fan brush and changed up the gran durung class at WAM.

Beboo

 

This is Beboo or Renee'. One of my youngest nieces.I am not a big fan of doing the drawing before the painting. So I started painting straight away. A big problem with that is, it is difficult to draw correctly with a paintbrush. But thanks to acrylics, I could keep on modifying the shape of face and lips and the color of different areas as the work progressed. I do like the end product. 

 

Free art lessons

I stumbled upon this amazing website today which had quite a few art lessons..

http://www.livepaintinglessons.com/FREELandscapePaintingLessons.php

I usually put these things in my blog reading list.. but this link was not accessible as a reading list. So I decided to make a post out of it so that I and (any readers for that matter) can have it at hand for future.

This is the artist's blog where he also has a link to a free ebook of his California painting trip. Which is quite nice I must say.