New approach - York Street in oil

Back in February, I entered a challenge set by US artist Terry Miura to paint a simplified version of a streetscape from a photo he supplied.

I chose to enter a digital painting, done in Photoshop, but it did whet my appetite for doing a streetscape of my own, in oils.

I used a primed board with a burnt sienna wash then followed the basic approach recommended by Terry – careful drawing, tonal map, transparent under-painting finishing with opaque paint.

You can see the gridded pencil drawing in this photo of the tonal map under-painting. The idea here is to simplify the image into three or four major tones. 

Then, (mostly) transparent colour was applied over the tonal map. Each area of colour is matched to the tone of the under-painting. Some minor adjustments have been made at this stage too.

  ( Summer Evening - York Street. 25x35cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Here I've painted over almost all parts of the scene with opaque paint but I am still guided by the tones built up in the earlier stages. Again, I've made subtle changes to areas as I've seen fit, in particular reducing the size of the sunlit areas of road in the middle distance. I'm not certain that I've finished with this one yet. I'm going to live with it in a temporary frame for a while and see what happens.

The painting depicts the main street in Albany, a small coastal city just 50km from my home. It's a very different subject for me but one I'll be investigating further in the future.

Terry Miura is a tonalist so his paintings are essentially monochromatic in that they often have a single colour permeating every part of the painting – and his major focus is on contrasting areas of lights and darks. Local colour and temperature shifts still play a part but are subordinated in his work. Terry is also pushing himself toward being more abstract, so detail is implied rather than stated. The combination of these things results in exceptionally moody and atmospheric scenes.

I live almost 400km from the nearest major city and I'm surrounded by farmland. Down here in southern West Australia, the air is clear – visibility extends beyond 50km on a typical day and colours are saturated for most of the year. On top of this, I am strongly attracted to the interplay of warm and cool parts of a scene.

While I have followed Terry's basic approach, and while tonal contrast forms the foundation of my paintings, I lean toward colour and temperature contrasts rather than tone alone.

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.

Roadside Shadows - landscape in oils

Here's my most recent painting...

(Roadside shadows. 60x40cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

The silhouette created by the shadow area in this scene really caught my eye as I drove along a road near Mt Shadforth recently. I have no idea what kind of tree that is, but it appears to have had a tough life.

"New" wheels...

My trusty old 1985 Mitsubishi L300 four-wheel drive is due for retirement. You might say "the sun is setting on her"...

Yesterday I got my "new" car, a 2004 Nissan X-Trail...

It's taken me a good while to make a decision so I'm hoping it will give me years of reliable service and let me visit some places I've been avoiding for quite a while now - and I can do it in comfort too.

With my new camera and my "new" car, I really do have to get some painting done now.

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)!

Two Waves Meet - seascape sketch in oils

I'm not sure what the title for the full-size painting will be, but "Two Waves Meet" will do for this sketch.

(Two Waves Meet - sketch. 30x25cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

This is a spot at Betty's Beach, near Albany in Western Australia. It's a great little cove with lots of boulders, nooks, crannies and some thumping-big waves.

There's about two hours work in this sketch which is based on a photo taken last week. The plan is to do a 60cm x 40cm painting from it.

Here's a close-up of the brushwork on the small wave in the foreground.

Betty's Beach - landscape in oil

Betty's Beach is a small fishing "village" near Albany in southern West Australia. It hosts half a dozen fishing shacks used by fishermen and their families during the salmon season and on holiday weekends. I discovered the place whilst aimlessly driving around about three years ago and finally got back there last week on a near-perfect, warm and sunny afternoon.

I hope to do quite a few paintings from this location. Here's the first one. At 90cm wide, it's the widest painting I've done for over eight years.

(Evening at Betty's Beach. 90x30cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin SOLD)

You can see this painting in animated stages in my last post.