watching you

back in black~ after choosing to paint without using black pigment for a while i felt that i kinda missed the color. although i know some combinations of other pigments that would give me a black tint, i've decided to consume my remaining tube of black oil paint before it goes stale. Here's a picture of my grumbacher ivory black before i started this project.

as i said earlier, i designed my next project to really use a lot of black paint. hopefully i get to consume the whole tube on this and have tons of fun.

starting with the eyes i wanted them to glow for a haunting look. i also tried to make the eyes intense, as if it was looking directly at the viewer. then i start with the color test on the upper left face furs.

after painting the fur, i decided to block in my black paint so i can have a sneak preview of what it will look like finished.

i repeat the same steps from the picture above to the lower part of the painting.

Here's of my ivory black grumbacher again, more than half of it consumed, too bad there's still 1/8 of paint left in the tube.

i wasn't able to take many pictures of the process but i had a blast ^_^

fishing king

oil on 18 x 24 canvas panel. first painting finished for the year 2012!! hope this becomes a more painting productive year than the last one and hopefully i get to make lots of obra maestras (master pieces) too.

i started debating whether to paint this kingfisher on a 16x20 or a 18x24 inch canvas. the 18x24 won because i had more canvases in this size in stock than the 16x20. although the original idea was to paint a life sized azure kingfisher which is approximately 6 to 8 inches tall. a bird of this size and in my composition would still look small on a 16x20 canvas. as you can see i went with a larger than life scale ratio instead.

if you look closely, i made some mistakes around the early stages of penciling. usually making penciling mistakes on canvas are irreparable because no matter how much eraser you use the pencil marks will never be gone so its better you not try to use an eraser at all. thankfully, it was only a minor error and i didn't need to prepare a new canvas for a fresh start so i just flipped the canvas upside down and started again.

this is also the first time im painting in a vertical format for my oil painting collection.

choosing the right background color went through quite a lot of color changes. at first i used a mixture of french ultramarine and thalo green but it turned out to be too light in shade so i chose payne's gray as a top coat. i was aiming for dim aquarium lighting so i needed a dark bluish green background. at this stage i also covered up most of penciling mistakes from earlier too.

i chose the dim aquarium lighting mood to highlight the kingfisher's decent into the water to catch its prey. adjusting the real color of the azure kingfisher with warm yellow lighting was a fun experiment.

with all the right color mixtures in place it was easy to paint the rest of the body. using cerulean blue, cobalt blue, permanent green light with titanium white painting the bubbles was easy.

choosing color for the caught fish was a bit tricky since this is an underwater scene with dim yellow lighting the fish scales would be bouncing all sorts of color. i thought it would be fun to portray the fish to be somewhat translucent and glowing.

the last time i painted stone texture was on my curious kitty painting. instead of using sponges for texture again i decided to use colors instead. unlike the curious kitty painting the stones in this composition was close up and i think the sponges would not be able to bring out the textures i have envisioned. i think i did alright starting with the top most stone on the left going to the right.

the last stages in my painting usually involves a lot of glazing to adjust the light and dark of color hues. finally finished.