More paintings...

I did some outdoor painting in the Berkeley hills with Noah, Jackson, and Daniel last weekend. The top two pieces are what resulted. On the first piece I had the challenge of simplifying enormous amounts of visual information. It was pretty difficult and I learned a lot from it. For the second, my painting of the hillside was pretty dead and wasn't going anywhere, so I took inspiration from Noah's recent pushing of his artwork and decided to do the same with this one, taking it in a whimsical direction. I don't think I'd ever done anything quite like that before. The third painting was done the next day in my own backyard.

The last two paintings are the same ones from my previous post, but with more work added to them. I thought they had a lot of potential as pieces to put in the gallery, but felt they needed a bit more pizzaz. For the dirt road I brought out more of the colors in the shrubbery and developed the shadows more. I originally created the Monterey coastal cliff image just to practice rendering the rocks and didn't pay much attention to the composition at the time. As such, I felt the composition was too blandly horizontal and lacked a focal point. I added some opposing mass to it in the form of the kelp forest and added some interest with a cute little sea otter. I think people visiting Salinas/Monterey will like that. How can you resist one of those cute little fellas?