HALFWAY BENCH

7/20/17

Front To Back

Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas

With a lot of time on his hands for the next week and a half before we leave for north Alabama, the OFM has been just moping around because it is too hot for him outside during the day. We finally got him going on a painting he has been off and on planning. It is a simple painting done in oil pastels. It has to be simple for him to even attempt it.

It was inspired by a much larger picture of some flowers that he took last month. The OFM took a liking to a particular pair of flowers and sketched them. Then while reading about a new to him technique he got busy and started the painting. Today it got finished. He is still learning a lot about artistic painting. The plan is to print a photo of this painting on some regular paper from one of these photos and then mark up the print with the things he notices he would like to do different or correct. That should be a good learning tool don’t you think?

After about a dozen oil pastel paintings, this effort convinced him he needs to work larger than the 5x7 rough size he has been using.  The Castle is small so he was trying to limit the storage space needed. However the small size that worked well for watercolor is really cramping his ability to smear the “crayons” around. So it is time for an improvement by using larger paper.

If you have followed this blog for a while you may recall that the campground in Decatur Al is in an area the OFM did a huge amount of artistic photography in during the preceding few years.  The Teams are thinking that this same area will inspire a lot of paintings due to its variety of views and beauty.

OK. Enough. Let us see the paintings!!!!!!!!
Well not so fast. It seems that we discovered something interesting during the photography session.  So tonight we have two different shots of the painting and the lighting makes a lot of difference. They will be shown without frames tonight so you get the RAW painting to laugh at. Here is the front lighted painting.




Then the OFM happened to stick it up on the insulation covering the window to store it for a minute. The difference astounded us all. Here is the back lighted painting.




One other thing was extremely evident while painting this scene. The cheap oil pastels purchased at Walmart were not even close to being able to handle the painting. They are heading for the dumpster in the morning. The professional quality Sennelier oil pastels were infinitely better and worth every penny more they cost. On top of that they made it easier for trying to have tooooo much fun.

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