Sunday, March 29, 2020

Hot Roddin' With Paint

I've been slacking with my posting lately, sorry about that,  and this one is going to be a short post, sorry about that too, but at least I'm giving you a video to watch to give you something to occupy 15 minutes of your stay at home time.




This painting is based on a photo I took at a big car show last year.  The car was built at a shop in Grantsville, Utah and is a bit famous having been published in Wheel Hub magazine so I stayed pretty true to the colors and features, of course the palette knife applied layers made it more abstract, but it's still quite obvious that it is a 1932 Ford hot rod.  Here's the finished painting;

hot rod painting art knife texture 1932 ford
"32 Hot Rod"
Click on image to purchase

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

An Agricultural Relic

I'm not sure where my love of old tractors comes from but I sure enjoy them.  Maybe it comes from playing in my Dad's wrecking yard when I was a kid, being exposed all summer to old, mechanical things, stuff that most people looked on as junk, but for me it was a playground, probably not legal today.

abandoned tractor Oilver rust farm machinery
Abandoned Oliver Tractor
Click on image to purchase

I always get excited when I see an old tractor sitting in a field, or in a barn while traveling the rural backroads of Utah and take plenty of photos.  That wasn't what happened with the subject of this palette knife painting however.  I found this old Oliver Tractor in Mcbride's Wrecking yard in Grantsville, Utah. Unfortunately pressures from the city caused Mcbride's to be closed a couple years ago.  I spent a couple hours walking around that yard and this is the second painting I've done based on photos I took there, I feel lucky I had that opportunity.  Obviously I moved the tractor to a more rural setting, a farm field in the background and tall, dead grass in front and backed by a group of trees.  This painting is also on the large side for me, 18" X 24".

Sunday, March 1, 2020

More Demo Videos

Another week on YouTube and three more videos to share with you.



This one is a little different in that it's a sketch instead of a painting.  I use a Copic Multiliner pen and Tombow brush pens to do a simple black and white sketch of an old, abandoned Chevy farm truck.  I saw and photographed this truck in Wallsburg, Utah.



I stepped up the complexity on this one a bit by adding a couple barns to make this a rural landscape.  Structural objects with well defined shapes can actually be a bit of a challenge to paint with palette knives.  I also approached the process just a bit different.  I did make a brush underpainting, intstead I blocked the painting in using a more thin layer of paint using the knife.  The painting is loosely based on a photo I took in Spring City, Utah.



This one bumped up the difficulty level considerably.   Barns are relatively simple shapes, but old vehicles are quite complex.  I decided to take that challenge on anyway by painting an abandoned early 1950's Chevy truck in an open grassy field.  Barns are primarily straight lines and very geometric without many details, whereas an old truck can have organic curves and lots of details.  This one really pushed my skills, especially since I had to do it in one sitting under a camera. The truck that served as the model for this composition was based on a photo I took at the Erickson Ranch in Wallsburg, Utah during the Antique Power Show.

That's this week's videos, I hope you watch and enjoy them.  If you do please click the "like" button, and if you want to be alerted to new videos when they come out hit the subscribe button and the "bell" notification icon.  Also, I'd very much appreciate any comments.  Thanks.