Blue and White Jar with Fruits, An Original Oil Painting

This painting was a bit more involved than my usual paintings, It took extra sittings to complete this piece. It has multiple layers of glazes and scumblings to heighten it's color and sense of drama. As much as I love alla prima painting, nothing excites me more than bringing a painting up to this level of a polished finish. Hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed painting it

Blue and White Jar with Fruits is painted on a 16" x 20" oiled primed canvas. The painting depicts a green apple, peaches, grapes, a green vine along with a blue and white jar/ canister.

Vine Ripened Tomatoes, Oil Painting

One of my greatest joys of summer is the taste of homegrown veggies. This years garden has kindly graced me with a steady of supply of my favorites. These were painted from tomatoes from the garden. They were indeed a pleasure to paint. Lessons learned were that tomatoes are not as red as I thought.

Thanks for stopping by.

Two Cherries, Original Oil Painting

I love painting fruit. There is something expecially fun and energetic about painting cherries. I think I just like experimenting with different shades of red. I just bought a bag of them, so if I can manage to paint them before I eat them all, there will be more cherry paintings to come.

The Making of "The Muffin" Tutorial

This oil painting tutorial is by no means the be all end all to painting a muffin. As you know, there are as many ways to paint as there are artist. What I hope to provide is motivation, inspiration and a little technical knowledge to anyone interested, as I explain how I approached this particular painting .

The first thing I would suggest for any artist to do is study you subject. Whether you are painting from life or a photo, get to know your subject. Study each area of the object. Look for areas of light, dark, shadows. Ask yourself:
1. What colors do I see?...Look for color patterns and shapes.
2. How I will paint the object...What techniques will I employ?.
3. Also make mental notes of any area that you might find challenging.


"The Muffin" was painted from real life. The photo shows the actual muffin that was used. I started this one by studying the muffin. I divided into areas the were defined by colors and shapes. I also made mental notes of where there were transitions of color.

The palette and material used were:

Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Naples Yellow, Transparent Red Oxide Red, Ivory Black and Titanium

White.
8 x 8 gallery wrapped canvas.
No. 8 Filbert, No. 4 Filbert, No. 2 Round and No. 6 Fan Brush
M. Graham Walnut Alkyd medium

I start by sketching the muffin on the canvas using very burnt sienna thinned with medium. For the background I used titanium white and Cadmium yellow. The yellow was used to provide a hint of warmth. The foreground was blocked Ivory Black and White to create
various shades of gray. Next I blocked in some of the basic shapes and color tones using a mixture of cadmium orange and trans oxide red. I chose to use the colors in the muffin for the initial block in for the shadow area because I wanted to add interest to the shadow areas.

Next, I experimented with different mixtures of colors. These were used to fill in the shapes trying to match the color that I saw in the muffin.

Finally some of the edges were blended to create softer transitions. Dashes of colors were placed here and there. The background and foreground were blended together using a soft fan brush. To complete the painting, the shadowed area was painted again with various shades of gray allowing some of the initial colors to show.

Chocolate Candy

I originally had planned for this painting to be a demo. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures. The picture on the right shows my progress when my memory returned.


I will say that I painted this one faster than usual because my model was under constant threat of being eaten, by everyone in my family, including myself. After this painting was done, the candy did not stand a chance.

Chocolate Candy is painted on a 11 x 14.