Plein air problems - shed landscape in oil

A couple of weeks ago I did my first watercolour painting. As a subject, I chose to repaint an old plein air oil painting of a rural shed near my home.

My purpose was two-fold: firstly, to have a go at watercolour and, secondly, to fix a few of the problems in the original oil painting.

Here's the original plein air piece, which I did about 13 years ago.

Barker Shed

35x25cm oil on board.  

© Andy Dolphin

At the time, I was pretty happy with this painting but over the years, I've realised several issues that needed fixing.

The two major issues are a lack of tonal depth – the background is almost as dark and as saturated as the foreground – and the busy brushstrokes and patterns of light and dark over-complicate the scene and reduce the visual impact.

I sorted both of those problems out in the much cleaner and much simpler watercolour painting.

Barker Shed

30x21cm watercolour on Arches medium.  

© Andy Dolphin

Yesterday, I decided to re-do the painting in oil, paying attention to those same problems and trying not to make the same mistakes again.

Barker Shed

30x25cm oil on board.  

© Andy Dolphin

While the finished oil painting is far more detailed than the watercolour painting (and took considerably longer to do), those details retain a sense of unity with their surroundings. The overall contrast, especially of the shed against the background, is much improved from the original.

The tonal pattern of the new painting also provides much better visual impact than the original plein air work. To compare the two, try squinting at them until you only see light and dark. The new painting delivers a much stronger pattern.

I also added a subtle path as a lead in and to break up the large foreground area which would otherwise be a major slab of green. The path carries some of the earthy shed colour down into the lower right corner which helps to create a colour harmony. The distant fruit trees perform a similar role.

You might also note I have dropped that wooden crate from the front of the shed. In reality, the crate is no longer there and I prefer it this way, so I left it out.

Although the final painting is substantially different in effect when compared to the original, it retains a genuine sense of place and I'm sure anyone who is familiar with the location would readily recognise it.

Spring was here!

It took a while to arrive, but spring did show itself for a few days recently. But, with summer just two weeks away, the grey weather has returned.

I bought myself some new brushes recently. I've been using flat synthetic brushes for the last couple of years but now I'm returning to good old, tried and tested hog bristles. The synthetics started to get a little bit too frustrating as they loose shape fairly quickly, even with careful washing and storage. They also occasionally refused to let go of the paint when making a stroke and I found myself adding more and more turps or medium to try and get things to work properly. There were times where this seriously slowed things down and time is one commodity the plein air painter rarely has enough of.

I might write a bit more about that once I've tamed my new bristles.

The continuing grey weather has given the opportunity to spend a little time in the studio and this week I did something I've rarely done in the past - I painted over some plein air sketches that I felt needed a lift in order to become frame-worthy.

The first one is a painting I did a while ago. It was painted very late in the day and the light faded fast. I used a "pre-mix" approach where almost all the colours are mixed on the palette before any colour is applied to the painting surface.

I mixed a few main colours for the trees - shadows and highlights, warms and cools - two for the hills, a few for the ground and two for the clouds, plus some blues for the sky. This was a first for me and I can see some potential advantages in the method when the light is changing fast, but I'm not sure how often I'll use it. What I generally tend to do is use a mix-and-apply approach in combination with pre-mixes for some specific areas where I want to lock-in colours at a given time.
 

  Porongurup Sheep. 

Plein air sketch. 35x25cm oil on board.

© Andy Dolphin

I liked the general structure of this one but the major forms were a little fractured and it lacked punch. I particularly wanted the sheep to catch a bit more of the evening sunlight. So I carefully scraped back the dry paint with a new palette knife, to get rid of the biggest ridges, and got to work. Here's the result...

  Porongurup Sheep. 

35x25cm oil on board.

© Andy Dolphin

My second re-do was first just two weeks ago. It was a perfect afternoon and I hadn't looked at this location before. The distant air was thick with sunlit vapour and almost swallowed the Porongurup Range less than ten kilometres away.

This was the first time I used my new brushes and was very pleased with the process. Here's the painting as it stood when I packed up...

  Takenup Cattle. 

Plein air sketch. 35x25cm oil on board.

© Andy Dolphin

...and a location shot, of course, for people who like that sort of thing...

And here it is after I scraped back the ridges and painted over it in the studio.

  Takenup Cattle. 

35x25cm oil on board.

© Andy Dolphin

I feel the end result does a far better job of capturing the glowing atmospheric light that attracted me in the first place. I also reduced some of the mid-ground clutter by deleting what appeared to be a second dam behind the one where the cows are standing.

In both cases, the major change I wanted to make was to add more warmth. I prefer bright, warm paintings but it can be easy to lose vibrancy when you're standing on the side of the road and painting quickly.

Both paintings were done - and re-done - using a three-colour palette.

Paperbark - plein air landscape in oil

After some fairly dismal weather over the last few days, the sun managed to pop out for a short while yesterday afternoon.

I found a washed out winter creek line on a property not far from home and spent half-an-hour or so wandering around it, taking photos. A gnarled paperbark arching over the creek caught my attention and I decided to grab my easel and see if I could capture something in paint before the rain returned or the sun set.

It did rain on me and the sun did set, but I got something that required very little attention back in the studio, so I'm not sure who won that race.

We'll call it a draw.

Here's the finished plein air oil sketch...

Narpyn paperbark, winter. 

Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board.

© Andy Dolphin
SOLD

As has been the case with almost every painting I've done in the last couple of months, the sun disappeared behind clouds for most of the time I was painting. It was a fairly simple scene so it wasn't to difficult to remember where the highlights should be but I had to be a little inventive with hue and saturation.

And it was cold (by Western Australian standards, not by Moscow standards), it snowed in the nearby Stirling Range in the morning. I actually wore gloves for this one – another "first" for me. And it rained on me half-way through this painting. And it was windy so I had my backpack sitting in my easel tray to stop it blowing away. So relaxing!

I used the painting knife again on this one. I think I'm slowly getting to grips with it. It's amazing how, sometimes, it gives you detail you would never have thought to add with a brush, but which looks like it should be exactly where it is.

And here's the "how do we know you were there?" location shot, taken with a flash because it was pretty dark at this point...

By my count, I've painted at this location seven times now in the last few weeks, and it's rained on me on five of those occasions. Who said painting was relaxing?

Stirling Afternoon - plein air video

My latest plein air landscape sketch video has just been uploaded.

This painting features a view across farmland to the Stirling Range, home to Bluff Knoll – the the highest peak in southern Western Australia.

(Stirling afternoon. Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

It was a very cloudy day but the sun did break through occasionally and light up the view. Days like this can be challenging if the sun spends too much time behind clouds but it peeped out often enough on this occasion to keep me almost sane.

I actually began this painting on a board I'd previously used for a plein air painting that ultimately failed. I had only laid in the foundational wash of that painting when the sun disappeared behind heavy cloud and all semblance of light and shadow vanished with little hope of returning that day. I scraped the paint off the board and wiped it back with a paper towel. This left me with a board already stained with a warm, transparent earthy tone.

NOTE: You can watch the video here on the blog but I'd recommend going to Youtube and viewing it at full size (click the little "cog" symbol and choose 480p if your internet connection can cope).

Thanks again to Kevin MacLeod, who offers hundreds of royalty-free music tracks on his Incompotech website.

Uploading this video generated an interesting copyright dilemma. If that sort of stuff fascinates you, you can read about it here.

You can see my first painting video, Barrow Road, on Youtube too.
Or my second video Winter Light - plein air painting.

Narpyn cottage - plein air oil sketch

This painting represents a very different approach for me. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time but it's not always possible to get close enough to a subject.

It is inspired by the likes of Richard Schmid, whose work I discovered in an issue of International Artist Magazine around 12 years ago, Harley Brown, whose book "Eternal Truths" provided guidance to me almost ten years ago, and Tibor Nagy, whose work I discovered online just a few years ago. I've long-admired their combined loose-tight style, where focused impressionism sits atop an abstract foundation. It's something I've been drifting toward for the last couple of years, especially with my plein air works.

This abandoned and somewhat derelict cottage provided a perfect opportunity for me to develop my style further.

Here's the thumbnail...

As you can probably see, it is all about the hard shadow cast across the wall of the house.

Here's the under-painting. The finished piece was mostly going to be cool greys but the cottage had a sort of organic, rustic charm, so I wanted a warm, earthy feeling to flow through.

I was soon challenged by the sun disappearing behind clouds,before I'd locked enough of the painting in place. In fact, it rained on me half-way through.

When the clouds roll in and the sunlit areas of the subject are cast into shadow, the details that used to be hidden away in dark shadow areas suddenly reveal themselves. It's easy to start fidgeting when this happens and unnecessary detail can creep into the painting.

And indeed, that's exactly what happened (you'd think I'd learn by now to just walk away or something, but no).

My original intent was to create a very loose, high contrast sketch with detail only around the focal point, the window. But I played with it while I waited for the sunlight to return and it tightened up more than I'd planned and I lost almost all the contrast. One of the major pieces of information I lost without the sunlight was just how the leafless, woody creeper was supposed to look. My thumbnail shows that it was probably very striking, and mostly brightly lit, but I no longer had any reference and, without the sun shining, it was just a drab collection of twisted grey sticks. I had to invent light and shadow for it.

But here it is. I popped it in a spare frame, as this can often help to identify issues (I think this one mainly needs more brightness on the sunlit wall)...

 Narpyn cottage. 
Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. 
© Andy Dolphin

I regard this one as little more than an exercise – not good enough to sell but not bad enough to scrape. I will go back and try this same painting again when the weather is more stable. I might even throw this one back up on the easel and see what lessons I can drag out of it by making changes.

Art and scams don't mix!

I received an email today asking about one of the artworks displayed on my old website gallery.

Hi there,
My name is Richard,im from phoenix,was browsing through the internet and my eyes caught this particular work(Emu Beach Path),will like to have it for my new apartment probably this month.please let me know if the piece is available and if yes let me have the detailed price and more information about it. i will be waiting to read from you.
Regards.

The name of the sender on the email is "Richard _ "  (I won't give the full name used as it matches that of an actual artist and I'm certain he has no involvement in this whatsoever). The message repeats the claim that the sender's name is "Richard" - but the email address is mmmoreef@gmail.com which bears no resemblance to the sender's name

Scams of all kinds happen to be one of my pet hobbies, so at no point was I under any illusion that this was a genuine request. I've seen all this before and this one might just as well have had sirens and flashing lights attached because my brain said "ALERT!" before I'd even finished reading the subject line (which was simply "Artwork").

But people do fall for these scams so I've decided to comment on it as we need to shine a light on these things before someone we know is affected. Once you become involved with these criminals, it can be difficult to stop the process and the outcomes can be tragic.

The first thing I did upon receiving this email was to confirm my suspicions by doing a quick search for part of the text. In this case I copied and pasted "was browsing through the internet and my eyes caught this particular work" into Google and, sure enough, the first results are all scam alerts. If that didn't work, I'd try other snippets or the email address (which also works well in this case).

Scammers don't have the time or education to be particularly creative. They don't need to be because it's just a numbers game. They send out thousands of these emails with virtually the same text and often with the same sender name. Even when they change the supposed name of the sender, the email address is usually still the same and still bears no resemblance to the sender's claimed name. It's not particularly sophisticated but they only need one or two people to bite to make the scam worthwhile.

I should point out that the email I received might seem convincing because it actually does name an Emu Beach Path painting that is on my website. But anyone who's ever used mail merge for addressing letters or envelopes will be familiar with how this process works. In short, the computer fills in a blank space using titles selected from different sites for different email recipients. The computer most likely found all the information for the scammer too. The human scammer has likely never seen my website.

My search today not only confirmed that "Richard" is an inveterate and semi-literate scammer but that he seems to have trouble remembering his own name. Other people have received the exact same email offer from someone supposedly called Michael. Although Michael apparently has trouble spelling his own name in his copy, mistakenly calling himself "Micheal", the emails otherwise contain the very same poorly written text and have the same reply email address.

Whoever "they" are, "Richard" and "Michael" are almost certainly involved in a cheque overpayment scam.

So how does this scam work?

• The scammer contacts you and offers to buy something.
• You reply, accept the offer and set a price.
• The scammer might want to organise freight themselves.
• The scammer sends you a cheque for far more than your agreed price.
• The scammer makes an excuse for overpayment.
• The scammer asks you to return the excess funds by money transfer or...
• The scammer asks you to transfer the excess funds to the freight company.
• You refund or forward the overpayment (could be several thousand dollars).
• You send the artwork.
• The original cheque bounces.
• You lose the artwork and several thousand dollars of your own money.

Individual cases may or may not involve a supposed freight company - the freight company is also the scammer by the way - or the overpayment might instead be explained as a mistake. Regardless, there will be some bizarre reason why you now have a cheque for a lot of money and another bizarre excuse for why you need to do something with that excess.

The conversations are likely to be surreal with the scammer explaining how unbelievably hectic their life is and how desperate they are to get this deal done urgently. They might go on to express their delight at dealing with you and their amazement at technology and the internet and sunshine and clouds and whatever else might make them seem sincere. Everything will be incredible and wonderful and you will be the best person in the world as you bring them great joy. They'll probably "bless you" too.

But at some point you will be asked to pay that excess money back.

Now, you could, maybe, cover yourself by doing nothing until the cheque has cleared but you won't win. You're dealing with criminals. At the very least, your own bank might hit you with a bounced cheque fee.

If you receive an offer that you suspect might be a scam you should always do a little "Google research" and if you're still not sure, there are websites like "Stop Art Scams" dedicated to throwing a spotlight on these criminals. And let's not forget that most governments in Australia have some sort of fair trading authority who are there to help with information on scams that are known to be doing the rounds. Some, like WA's ScamNet, even have mailing lists you can sign up to so you can receive regular scam news updates.

One of the simplest rules, it seems to me, is to never send any money to someone, or on behalf of someone, who is supposed to be sending you money.

Oops! I forgot to mention that had "Richard" actually looked at my online gallery, the only place where Emu Beach Path is featured, he would have seen that it was sold. Sorry to disappoint, Richard.

Art Scams

Oil and water don't mix!

Ever since I started painting, I've favoured scenes with sunlight and shadow. I love the hard contrasts of dark against light, warm against cool. And it's not that it makes painting easier, it just happens to be what catches my eye even when I'm not actively seeking out things to paint.

On the one or two occasions where I've painted on overcast days, the results have been less than spectacular.

And yet, I see other artists turn out beautiful paintings on what can best be described as dreary days. Their skies are grey, their landscape is grey, nothing is bright and shiny - but the end results of their efforts are very appealing.

With autumn here and the clouds already rolling in, I decided that this year I was going to push myself to paint outdoors on overcast days. With that in mind, I headed out to the coast yesterday afternoon to see if I could find some grey-day inspiration. I finally found something that looked promising and started to paint.

Ten minutes in, it started to rain. It wasn't cold so I just kept painting.

Here's the palette after about 20 minutes. The painting itself had almost as much water sloshing around on it.

Then it stopped raining for a while, before starting to rain again. "Oh, this is fun", I thought to myself.

It's actually lucky that oil ad water don't mix, otherwise my painting would have little more than a puddle on the shell-grit beach. As it was, the oil repels the water just enough to allow you to keep working. But it was messy and it took a bit of effort to get paint off the palette, onto the brush and then onto the painting.

Anyway, after a little over an hour, I ended up with something that shows promise. Here's the location shot taken just before the next lot of rain arrived.

And here's the finished piece. This quiet little beach offered an interesting shape, a range of textures and colours and some stark tonal contrasts even on this very cloudy day.

 Near Quaranup. 
Plein air sketch. 
30x25cm oil on board. 
© Andy Dolphin
SOLD

I took this photo this morning. If you click to enlarge the pic, you'll see some dried-out rain drops are still there.

So, it's not fantastic but it is something. I'll mess with it a bit and see what I can salvage from it.

Seascape painting; Misery

It's not as bad as it sounds...

On Wednesday I headed down to Misery Beach, near Albany. I'm not sure how this gorgeous and secluded little beach got its name but one popular suggestion is that waste products from the nearby whaling station used to wash up here before the facility ceased operations in 1978.

Conditions were mostly overcast when I arrived but the sun did break through in short intervals every ten or fifteen minutes, or so. It was windy too!

It's been a long time since I've set up the easel on beach sand and it's always an interesting challenge. The legs have to be fully extended and pushed into the sand - because they're going to sink in anyway and you don't need that happening while you're painting. And you have to be careful not to get sand into everything when you're doing stuff you normally don't need to think about.

Oh, and don't drop a brush full of paint into the sand. It's a nuisance. I know because I did it. Luckily it was only my rigger so it was easy to clean. If you drop your main brush, you'll almost certainly end up spreading grains of sand across your painting unless you have a large jar of solvent you can rinse it out in.

Anyway, here's the location shot. I had to fold up the easel and lean it against a stair case because the wind was threatening to blow it over if I walked away while it was still set up.

And here's the finished piece with no adjustments or additions made later.

 (Misery Beach. Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I used a very limited palette for this one to keep things simple. Because of the overcast conditions, I went for ultramarine, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. I chose these colours because the actual scene reminded me of one of the paintings in the "oil painting in different palettes" exercise I did last year.

It was mid-afternoon when I painted this. The key to it, and what attracted my attention, is the shadow being cast half-way down the face of the dune and the way this shadow-highlight line zig-zags into the scene.

One hour earlier that shadow wouldn't have been there at all. One hour later, as I was finishing, the shadow covered the whole face of the dune. Either case might still have offered the opportunity for  a satisfactory painting but each one would have a different feeling.

Evolution of a seacape in oil - V

I have actually been doing a bit of painting recently but all of it has been in the studio and has involved revisiting old paintings that never "made the cut".

This isn't something I have done a lot of in the past but lately I've been driven to discover why some paintings end up on "the pile in the corner", instead of hanging in a frame. So I've been looking through that pile to see where I can spot obvious design errors as, in many cases, this is where a painting fails.

One of the pieces I looked at this week was a painting of Lights Beach I did in March last year.

 (Breaker at Lights Beach - sketch. 30x20cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

This painting was done as an exercise, from photographic references, and I have messed with it several times in the last 10 months, playing with shapes and contrasts to see if I could get more out of it. My main interest early on was the depiction of the foam trails breaking up as the transparent water rises into the main wave.

It is fairly true to the photos but I always felt it was a little contradictory as it portrayed a supposedly large threatening wave but was, at the same time, bright and sunny. My biggest issue with it, however, was the relatively horizontal feeling of the design, the detachment of the rocky areas and the lack of a path through the painting to the focal point. There is a path there, through the greenish water to the peak of the wave, but it's very subtle and doesn't act to connect to the foreground to the middle ground.

I've painted quite a few plein air wave studies since last March and I feel I'm in a better position now to incorporate some of that experience into future seascapes.

I put the small painting on my easel and gave it a light coating of alkyd medium to wet the surface and bring the painting back to life. With just a few colours on the palette, I spent about half an hour loosely "sculpting" paint over the old painting. Abandoning my earlier focus on the transparent part of the wave, I altered shapes and shadows in an attempt to get a more dynamic composition and more of a feeling of power in the surf.

Here's where it's at now...
 

(Breaker at Lights Beach - sketch. 30x20cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

It's pretty loose, with some areas almost completely unresolved, but that's okay for this painting. What matters more is that the foreground and middle ground are now decidedly interconnected and that there is a feeling of powerful movement in both the foreground and mid-ground water.

While it is no longer exactly like the original photo reference, it is still true to the location and captures the feeling of the place much better. It feels like it has potential now and I'll visit it again soon in order to tidy a few things up.

The revised painting now becomes stage 5 in my Evolution of a seascape in oil series.

Seascape oil painting series:
Genesis of a seascape in oil - I
Genesis of a seascape in oil - II
Genesis of a seascape in oil - III
Evolution of a seascape in oil - IV
Evolution of a seascape in oil - V 
Evolution of a seascape in oil - VI

Lowlands surf - plein air seacape in oils

 Lowlands Beach, Denmark. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

My second painting for 2013 was, in some ways, an exercise in not giving up.

We've had pretty strong winds for the last couple of days so I assumed the surf would be pounding along the southern coast. With this in mind, I decided to head to Lowlands Beach, between Albany and Denmark, to see what was happening.

It was pumping! The spray in the photo above is reaching over 50m high, in strong wind.

I stood at the lookout, high above the rocks, and stared. The action below was non-stop and complicated. I must have pondered the scene for 45 minutes or so trying to select an area and cement an image in my mind. Several times I considered moving on to find a location that was simpler and more protected from the wind.

Eventually I just decided to sit and scribble a thumbnail. Hmmm, possibilities. With that done, I decided to set up the easel and have a go. I haven't really painted in a situation quite like this before but, since I was prepared to fail, it didn't matter what result I got.

I decided to just rough out where the major rock forms were but not complete them, yet. Then I focused my attention on the area where the breakers were hitting the rocks. Every wave is different and the bursts of spray last mere seconds, so there's a fair bit of invention involved in capturing the general feeling. I put the burst where I wanted it.

I worked my way out from the focal point and completed other areas in stages until I was happy with the results. By that time the sun had almost set.

Here's the location shot...

And here's the painting...

 (Pounding surf, Lowlands. Plein air sketch.
35x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

It's funny that once the painting is done it all looks so simple, but there was a lot of stopping and staring involved in this one. I spent almost as much time squinting at the scene as I did painting. The lesson here is to not give up and to accept possible failure as a part of progress.

I used a very limited palette on this painting. Ultramarine, cerulean, burnt sienna and cad yellow deep. Mixing nice transparent purple-blue shadows is impossible with that combination of colours but it really wasn't that kind of day anyway. Limiting my colour choices meant I could concentrate more on composition and tone.

Here's how my mixing palette ended up...

A little about brushwork

When I first switched from commercial to fine art, I tended to paint with almost painstaking attention to detail. I used fine brushes and painted leaves on shrubbery in forest landscapes or feathers on portraits of birds. It was a hangover from my days working as an illustrator.

My style has evolved over the last decade, with small breakthroughs in technique occurring every couple of years. It's taken me a long time to loosen up but the last year has seen me become more comfortable with producing loose-looking brushwork.

This particular breakthrough probably came about as a result of a combination of factors:

• Painting outdoors far more often
• Forcing myself to simplify
• Doing a lot of small paintings
• Setting time limits on some paintings
• Using three brushes, or less
• Rarely using "small" brushes

I switched to using chisel-edged, flat synthetic brushes about a year ago. I'd discovered such a brush that I'd owned for years but never used. I tried it, liked it and bought a few more. I've rarely touched my old bristle brushes since (and several of them should probably be binned anyway).

I mention all this because I was speaking to a friend last night who was giving me her assessment of some of my work. The paintings that really caught her eye were the more expressive ones, with loose brushwork. She felt they had more "personality" – a bit more of "me".

With that in mind, I thought I'd post a close-up of the karri tree painting I did last week. Here's some of the brushwork in the shrubbery at the base of the main tree.

click to see the detail 

Those almost-horizontal green strokes near the centre represent bracken ferns. Ten years ago I would have spent hours just on them, while these ferns took mere seconds to paint and, for a painting this size, they are as successful as any of the detailed plants I painted in the past.

These plants are only as detailed as they need to be but they aren't thrown on randomly, without any thought. They have tone, colour and temperature. Some parts are in shadow, other parts in sunlight and they express the umbrella-like flatness of bracken ferns – and, although they sit against a very dark area, they are restrained enough to not steal attention from the rest of the painting.

Those strokes were painted with one brush, about 1.5cm (3/4") wide. I placed the loaded brush flat on the surface and dragged it very slightly to make the main strokes. First the cool green shadow then the warm sunlit area. I used the corner of the brush to make the bright, specular highlights.

In fact, I used two brushes of that size on this painting, one for the sunlit colours and one for the shadow tones. I used a slightly smaller one for some "detail" and, finally, I used a rigger for a few "grassy" strokes here and there. Most of what you see, however, was painted with the two larger brushes.

The thin vertical strokes in the ferns were probably also painted with those large brushes as they are certainly capable of producing sharp lines. It is also possible, however, that I flicked those strokes on with a rigger. The thin, twiggy lines near the bottom are a combination of scratching with a satay stick and painting with the rigger.

The point of all this?

Paint loosely, not carelessly.

Karri: a plein air landscape in oil

Over the years I've painted a lot of karri trees. I saw most of them as "tree portraits", each painting trying to capture the character of a tree in a particular location. Ive painted them next to winding tracks, streams and bridges and I've had them side-lit, back-lit and front-lit. Almost all of them were painted from photo references.

Yesterday, with near-perfect spring weather, I headed out to the Porongurup Range and took a drive through the karri. I was looking for dancing light on some of the granite boulders that populate many parts of the forest but came around one bend and saw sunlight streaming past a large karri perched on the edge of the embankment. I had to paint it!

I took a few minutes to consider composition options - how high, how wide, what to leave in and what to leave out. Then set to work.

Here's the on-location photo showing the painting almost finished.

Here's the "morning after" shot.

Karri on the edge. 
Plein air sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. 
© Andy Dolphin
NOT FOR SALE

I did very little studio work on this, mainly adjusting a few darks and lights that had gone a little muddy in the plein-air rush. It's painted with a fairly limited palette of French ultramarine, cerulean, permanent crimson, cad yellow light and burnt sienna.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to show why photographs are often poor reference material for painting. Here's a shot I took when I began yesterday's painting.

Other than resizing for the blog, this photo is straight from the camera. It was taken with a Canon DSLR. It's a reasonable quality camera with a decent digital chip and, while I don't consider myself a great photographer, I do have some idea about how to use it. Professional photographers might get better results, but how many of us are professional photographers?

In the photo, everything is either green, "grey" or black. The gravel road, that was positively glowing a rich terracotta, looks dead here. The greens are almost-universally cold and vary more in tone than colour or temperature. There's no hint of the warm spring weather I was enjoying. The shadow from the tree is just a big mass of dark "something" and the sky shows barely a hint of blue.

I stood and stared at this tree for over an hour and can assure you, the photo doesn't come close to how things actually looked. Sure there's some exaggeration in my painting but I'm hardly an expressionist. The scene really was filled with colour and warmth. There was texture and detail visible in the dark lower bark of the main tree and the sunlit area at the left-hand base of that tree glowed with rich reddish earth tones - it's what caught my eye in the first place. The canopy of the distant trees was similarly bathed in sunlight - everything back there seemed to be glowing. In fact, I had to tone some areas down in my painting so they didn't compete with my main area of interest.

It's spring. If you visit the Porongurups at this time of year, you're greeted with reds, blues, yellows and pinks of wildflowers, yet the photo above gives no hint of this. It could just as easily be a clear winter's day. With a painting, we can include the colours of the spring, even if there don't happen to be any flowers visible in the exact spot we're painting.

I can adjust this photo in Photoshop to get it closer to how I remember things but, even then, it lacks useful information. To use it as a photo reference, I'd have to be inventive and to do that successfully, I'd need a lot of experience with the subject matter. And if I didn't look at the photo until month after I took it, would I even remember what caught my eye on the day? History suggests to me that I wouldn't.

In short, if you can possibly get out and paint on location, do it. It doesn't matter if the individual paintings fail (I did another one after this that I scraped off as soon as I got home). What matters is experiencing nature first hand.

Copyright - do you "get it"?

 And now for something completely different...

I first took an interest in copyright years ago when I was producing commercial illustration. Not because someone had stolen my work but because I wanted to be informed about my rights with regard to my own work and also to know what I was, and more importantly was not, allowed to do with other people's work.

History has taught me that I seem to be in a tiny minority. While almost no one could be in much doubt these days about the illegality of copying music and video, few people seem to understand, or care about, copyright in relation to artworks.

Before I continue, let me state that I am not a lawyer and do not have in-depth knowledge of copyright law. But I think I can give the reader a few things to think about.

Firstly, it's "CopyRIGHT", not "CopyWRITE". 

Copyright, as the term implies, is about the "right to copy" something. It could be a song, a movie, a painting, a piece of pottery or, indeed, written words. Copyright exists the moment a work is created. It does not have to be registered or contain a copyright (©) symbol. Even a quick sketch on a café napkin has automatic copyright protection.

If you want to use someone else's work but have no understanding of your rights then it might be safest to live by the simplest "rule":

If you didn't make it and you didn't pay for the right to copy it, you probably don't have the right to copy it. So don't do it.

That's pretty blunt, and yes, there are exceptions, but it sums up almost every situation you might find yourself in when considering if you have the right to use artwork, including photographs, for your own purposes.

You don't own the internet and almost all the things on it don't, and never will, belong to you.

When you want to make an advertisement, logo or promotional print for your club, business or just for yourself, you can't legally just go to "Google Images", find a picture you like and use it. It's stealing.

Google does not own the rights to the images it serves up in a search so Google has no power to authorise the use of those images. Think of a Google search as "window shopping" - you can see the products you want but that doesn't mean you can just take them and use them without permission. The images almost always belong to someone and that someone probably isn't you. It's a pain, but that's reality for you.

Exceptions might apply if the author specifically gives rights to use their works for certain purposes. For example, I state in my sidebar that my blog images can be used freely in some circumstances and that permission can be sought for other uses - and I have given that permission, for free, to several people who have asked. But you cannot use one in an advertisement for your business, for example, without permission.

There are also exceptions in the law that might allow you to use an image without permission. Copyright law differs from country to country but such exceptions might include:

• review or criticism
• research or study
• news-reporting
• judicial proceedings or professional legal advice
• parody or satire

[source: wikipedia] 

There's also quite a bit of nonsense surrounding copyright law...

Silly reasons to infringe copyright:

•  "it's okay if you change 10% of it" - nonsense. 
• "it's okay, I'm not making money off it" - doesn't matter
• "the web is public domain" - nonsense
• "I improved it. You should be happy" - nonsense
• "I'm giving you better exposure" - doesn't matter
• "I included your signature or link" - doesn't matter
• "I don't know who owns it" - not you
• "I tried to contact the author" - you failed
• "I was on a deadline" - doesn't matter
• "It didn't have a © symbol on it" - doesn't need one
• "I copied it from an amateur" - it's still copyrighted
• "It said 'free desktop wallpaper'" - it didn't say "copy me"

There are more. Some people seem to be able to easily remember the complicated nonsense, but never the simple reality.

Copyright and fine art:

Artists, and some art owners, should learn about copyright and how it might apply to them. 

Buying a painting, for example, does not mean you also own the right to reproduce that painting. You own the item, but not the intellectual property. You can hang it on your wall. You can re-frame it (usually). You can probably burn it to warm yourself on a winter's night. But you can't make postcards from the image because that requires copying. The artist always retains the copyright unless they explicitly transfer that right, in whole or in part, to someone else - or maybe if they died over 70 years ago (and that number keeps changing).

Artists often learn their craft by copying existing works. They might copy from the old masters, from "how to" books or from workshop demonstrators. Obviously demonstration pieces are intended to be copied for learning purposes - but that's pretty much where the right to copy ends. Copied pieces should not usually be offered for sale as the copying artist's own work and should never be entered into competitions since the creative foundation of the painting is a large part of what gets judged - and the expression of the idea isn't yours, it belongs to the original artist.

The lines can sometimes seem a little blurry and if you're unsure, seek legal advice. If that's too expensive, then you probably can't afford the risk of a copyright infringement anyway.

The world is growing smaller by the day. Things that happen in the most isolated corner of Australia can now be seen, within seconds, from the other side of the world. To illustrate why this matters, let me briefly tell you the tale of  "Cooks Source", a small, free, hand-delivered publication produced in America since 1997.

Cooks Source were apparently reproducing, without permission, recipes they'd sourced on the internet. When they were caught out by the author of some of the recipes, Cooks Source defended their action claiming the internet is "considered public domain" and effectively telling the author she should be happy they'd used them. "The internet" retaliated and within hours word spread across blogs and social media sites illustrating a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect (where an attempt to hide a situation results in it receiving much wider publicity). The magazine's own Facebook page was bombed with complaints. I witnessed it all happening - it was a sight to behold.

After some 13 years of operation, Cooks Source closed two weeks after the internet backlash. It was an incredible lesson in where copyright infringement might lead.

You can read the full story on wikipedia.

Again, I am not a lawyer. Do not rely on this as advice. If you're in Australia, however, you might want to visit the Copyright Council of Australia's website or Arts Law for more detailed information.

Comments are very welcome and, I'll make adjustments or additions to this article as the need arises.

Plein air challenge!

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

Date: Sunday, August 26, 2012
Weather Forecast: Fine with a late change

I made the decision that, with fine weather forecast, I'd head out to a spot near Albany that offers incredible views over the Torndirrup coastline. My plan today was to come home with more than just photos.

I found a spot just off the walk trail, and a few metres short of a very long drop over a very high cliff. I was around 180m above sea level. The sun was shining, the sky was clear and there was a gentle breeze blowing. It was near-perfect. So I set up my easel and got to work.

I worked on a panel that had been stained with burnt sienna. I used it mainly because I had it with me and it was the right shape.

Knowing the light would change dramatically, I pre-mixed small samples of critical colours and referred to these throughout the painting process. I used my oil colour chart to determine the best colours to use for each mix and was surprised to note that the deep ocean was almost a perfect match to cerulean blue out of the tube. In fact, cerulean featured in mixes throughout the painting from the sky to the sunlit hills and rocks.

I approached this painting is a relatively steady manner, rather than as a quick sketch. I roughly outlined the major shapes, separating sunlit and shaded areas, before under-painting all parts in approximate final colours. Then I painted the sky and worked my way down and "forward", painting into all areas before adding the white-wash along the edge of the coastline. I left the white-wash until fairly late in the process because it doesn't really shift much in colour. My main concern was the shadow side of the hills because I knew those shadows would disappear completely as the sun moved higher in the sky. I finished with dark accents and highlights.

A strong wind warning had been issued for the afternoon and the breeze grew steadily over the two hours that I painted. I eventually had to take my hat off because I was holding onto my easel with my spare hand. If anything blew away, I wasn't going after it!

While I was packing up, TRAGEDY!!!! struck!!! (Yes, there were definitely exclamation marks when it happened). The very wet painting fell off the easel and face first into the sand. Hmmm.

"Golly gee!", I said. "That's just a little bit too authentic", I added. Or, something like that.

When I got back to the studio, I decided it was worth fixing. Using a razor-blade scraper, I carefully removed the paint where the sand was stuck, leaving a ghost of colour behind. I mixed up some fresh paint and set to work. It only took about half an hour to recover things.

 (Plein air View to Cave Point. 35x22cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Bonus material:

Here's a few "quick" sketches I've done around the Torndirrup coast in the last week or so.

Showers are forecast for tomorrow but I might head to the coast again, and see what's happening.

Storm-tossed seas

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Weather Forecast: Severe Weather Warning

With severe weather forecast, I made the decision that I would head back to my favourite bit of Albany coastline this afternoon. I've seen it in the lead up to a storm before, but not during one.

I knew it wouldn't be pretty but I packed my paints and easel up, just in case there was an opportunity for some plein air action.

The weather bureau don't always get it right.

But they were right this time. All hell was breaking loose along the exposed sections of coastline. The spray from the breakers smashing against the rocks was non-stop and drenching - and the wind carried it long distances, like right across the car park, 100m away, and all over my car. And it wasn't the usual coastal mist, this was like short bouts of heavy rain.

Here's a plein air painting I did a week ago...

And here's what that spot looked like today, from a slightly lower viewpoint...

Painting was obviously off the menu today and I had to settle for photos and video. My poor camera was copping it and I had to keep wiping the lens on my jumper to get rid of the spray (I have a cheap UV filter on the lens for this very reason. Lenses are too expensive to mistreat. I probably should carry a lint-free cloth though.)

Can you see the person standing on the viewing platform in the photo above (click the pic for a bigger image)? This is a spot known as The Gap and the ocean is some 25m below the viewing platform. There's a pretty scary amount of force behind that wave! And the wind at the platform was phenomenal.

Above is Cable Beach, a "sheltered" bay near The Gap. A few days ago the water was crystal clear, there were small fishing boats visible way out to sea and I was watching dolphins leisurely patrolling the shore at this very spot.  The only dolphin seen there today was me!

There's a 100 tonne boulder on the beach, just out of shot. Apparently it washed up one day in a storm - a much bigger storm than today's.

Above and below are photos of Salmon Holes, a deadly beach near the end of the Torndirrup Peninsula. People often stand on that sloping rock in the left foreground in the hopes of catching fish. Some never get to go home because, even on calm days, massive swells wash a long way up, along and back down it. My fish comes from a shop.

In all, I used up over 10Gb of my SD card this afternoon - over 400 photos and videos in just under four hours (although some are just blurry blobs because of the water-covered camera lens). I packed up when it got too dark. And did I mention it was cold? It was cold. My cheeks were burning from the chill. The things I do for this blog!

But I loved every minute of it. We'll see if any paintings result from the effort.

Oil Sketches - Porongurup

I've not had much opportunity to get out and paint recently but did manage these two quick sketches in the last week.

The first was completed in around 15 minutes and was the end result of a "comedy of errors".

I was breaking in a new French easel and had prepared the palette by staining it with old oil paint to give it a dull grey colour - much better for mixing paint on. When I arrived on site to paint (after driving around aimlessly for over an hour, close to sunset), I opened up the easel only to find I'd left the palette at home. Hmmm.

Luckily, I usually carry a few primed painting boards with me and one of these had to play at being a palette for a while. I wiped a bit of turps over it to give it a bit of slip. It wasn't too bad but did hold onto the paint mixes more than a properly prepared palette.

By now, the sun was already low and things were starting to colour-up. So I put a red, yellow and blue out and started painting. I was set up in front of a farm gate and, sure enough, the owner came along and needed to get out. So I moved a couple of metres across and continued. Then the sun disappeared behind clouds, then everything turned shades of red - before going dark. I strapped a headlamp on as I added the final brushstrokes.

(Tree sketch. Oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

The second painting was a little more straightforward. It was still begun a little later than usual and the sun did tend to hide behind clouds most of the time but I got an extra five minutes or so to complete it before it went dark. I'm going to go back to this spot again with a bit more time up my sleeve.

(Porongurup sketch. Oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

I have been working on another painting for a few weeks now. It's a new subject for me and I'm taking a different approach with it. It's proving more challenging than I'd anticipated but hopefully I'll post a finished pic soon.

Big Breaker - seascape in oil

A week ago, after visiting William Bay National Park in Denmark, I was looking at photos of the region on the internet. This is a great way to discover new and interesting places that you might have driven by over the years.

One such place is Lights Beach. While it is in the same national park as the very popular Greens Pool, it is accessed via a different road. The photos I saw made it look inviting from an artist's point of view so on Friday, with clear skies looking set to hang around, I headed off to Denmark.

Lights Beach didn't disappoint. It is an amazing place with hazy long-distance vistas, secluded bays, a seasonal creek flowing across the beach, large rocky outcrops and, most importantly, massive waves breaking close to shore.

I took over 450 photos in a couple of hours!

I wanted to do a large painting (60cm x 40cm is large by my standards) that captured the mood of Light Beach but knew it was going to be a challenge. There was so much white foam on the water that, at times, it looked more like a snow-scape. I decided to do a small study to see what problems lay ahead...

Other than the messy foreground, I quite like stage one, above, as a painting in its own right.

If this was to be a finished painting at this size, I probably wouldn't have gone much further than stage two. Just a little tightening in a couple of key areas, like putting some "clear" water back into the peak of the wave, and it would work quite nicely. But the purpose of this exercise was to experiment with ideas and techniques for a larger piece.

 (Breaker at Lights Beach - sketch. 30x20cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

This is where I ended up. There's a lot I like about this. The key shadow area cast by the breaking wave is pretty much how I wanted it and the overall composition and tonal values work for me. I did have a bit of an ongoing battle with the large mass of blanket foam through the middle ground, too light, too dark, too light... but some of that battle is more related to the small size of the painting as even small brush strokes were often not small enough.

Here's a photo of one part of Lights Beach, after an especially large breaker turned the sea to cottage cheese (or whipped cream or shaving foam or something)!

New camera!

It's taken almost three years to make a decision but I finally bought myself a new digital camera.

My first digital camera, purchased almost ten years ago, was a 4MP Nikon 4300 Coolpix. It was expensive at the time but I loved it to bits. The picture quality was astonishing, even by current standards in my opinion, and it had plenty of manual controls so I could override the auto functions when necessary. But it eventually started playing up (I did tend to drop it a lot) so I had to retire it.

Then I needed a camera to take away on a trip and I had to make a quick decision, so I naturally went with Nikon again. This time it was a cheap and simple L18 Coolpix. At 8MP I'd expected better results than I was used to with its 4MP cousin, but it wasn't to be. I've had it for almost three years and never really been happy with it. The images just never felt "right" and, frankly, didn't seem to me to be as sharp or detailed as the lower-resolution images from the 4300.

So I've been watching camera prices - and reading reviews - for a while until finally, this week, I saw a Canon 1100D SLR on sale for under $400. I wasn't really after a DSLR but I'd never seen them this cheap before so it was hard to pass up.

48 hours later and I'm loving it.

This little guy is a Bobtail Skink and was wandering across our back lawn this afternoon. Much more acceptable than the tiger snakes we've had hanging around for the two previous summers.

For those who are fascinated by such things, the photo was taken with the standard 18-55mm lens at full zoom, auto-focus, with the camera on macro setting. I was about 30-40cm away. I've cropped this section because the full image is a 4.5MB file.

I just love the detail.

So in future, when I mention that the photos of the paintings that I post here aren't up to scratch, you can blame the photographer (me), not the camera.