Category: Year 1
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Sunset Road: 1 & 2
I realized that Im stuck in a bit of a rut as far as my paintings go. I think part of the reason Im stuck here is because Im trying to do too much, and Im listening very closely to my inner critic. In my mind, as I paint, there are a slew of teachers…
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Plateau and Failed Paintings
Progress in anything Im familiar with is marked by improvement curves and plateaus. Im in a plateau right now with my watercolor. I wonder if its because I have been trying to learn by watching many different painters and trying to grab what lessons I can from them all. Maybe, learning this way is the…
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Mark Sargents Flat Earth Model
The only Flat Earther I am aware of who has proposed a mostly working model is Mark Sargent. Mark Sargent says we are living on a flat Earth, and all of the things we see in the sky are projections on a solid dome. Beyond this dome is undefined – the sum total of our…
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Plein Air-McKinley Monument: #1
I have been wanting to get outside and try some Plein Air painting for a while. Ive been so busy lately that I havent had time to get out, so I decided to prioritize it today. I need some sun, and some stillness. I drove to the McKinley Monument and set up. I started with…
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So it Goes: #1
Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the Tralfamadorians a lot. They are an alien race in his books, and one thing that always interested me about them is that they live freely in time. They compare the human experience to being on a train car in an iron suit thats bolted in place, with a helmet that…
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The Ravine: #6
I like this sooooo much more than #5. It still has a way to go, but Im happy with this for now. I was watching videos of Joseph Zbukvic painting, and I came across one of a painting that captured a lot of what Im after in this exercise, so I tried to follow along.…
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The Ravine: #5
Im still trying to get the feel of my memories of the Ravine communicated in a painting. It turns out, nostalgia is tough to paint. Especially when you arent feeling particularly nostalgic. I really dislike this image, and hesitated to post about it, but Im trying to be good about posting the progress. My hope…
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The Ravine: #5
I wanted to try the Ravine again while the lessons from my last attempt were fresh in my mind. And – you just cant leave the driving range on a worm burner. I didnt bother with a value study because I wanted to paint this one from my last attempt. One of the things I…
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The Ravine: #4
I spent countless hours as a kid walking through a ravine near my house, sometimes with my brothers and sister, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. It was always a place where my imagination seemed to yawn open and suddenly thousands of worlds were possible. We spent days cooking salami on coffee cans, or trying to…
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Why Doesn’t Space Suck all the Air Away?
I watched a debate recently between Mark Sargent and a lawyer Viva Freito discuss the Flat Earth conspiracy. In that video, Mark Sargent started by asking, “If the Earth is a globe, surrounded by the vacuum of space, why doesn’t the vacuuum of space suck all the atmosphere away?” The video is here. (If you…
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A resolute drowning: #1
I was away for a week for work, and I didnt paint at all. I drove home and I really wanted to get the paints out. I didnt want to paint another exercise from the book tonight, so instead, I painted from my mind. I wanted to try to use some of the lessons I…
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con-science: debating the flat earth
I have recently become pretty much addicted to watching videos of people attempting to debunk the Flat Earth idea. The more I found myself watching these videos, the more I started to wonder: Why do I enjoy watching these so much? Why do people actually believe that the Earth is flat? What would it take…
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Fog exercise 1: #1
This is the next exercise in Ron Hazells Painting Water with Watercolor. This exercise is supposed to tech me about painting fog. Unfortunately, I dont think I quite captured the effect. I want the wharf and the houses and boat to be more obscured by the fog – which I think could be achieved by…
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Waterfall Exercise 2: #1
This is the next exercise in Ron Hazells Painting Water with Watercolor. The composition here kind of didnt make much sense to me, I dont understand the waterfall – it almost looks like a stream running down the side of a termite hill. But, Im not about to question Ron Hazell, so I tried to…
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Suzi Hike:#5
This is the fifth and final painting in a series that I did for my friend Suzi Lantz who commissioned these paintings for her 100 X leadership summit in Canton. This painting is the most technical out of the five. Really trying to focus on the distant hills this time in the past paintings those…
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Suzi Hike: #4
This is the fourth painting in the series of paintings that Suzi Lantz commissioned me to do for her 100 X leadership summit here in Canton. I wanted to try to lend some perspective to this painting by carefully measuring the perspective of the lines generated by the rocks and the grass between the rocks.…
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Suzi Hike: #3
This is the third painting in a series commissioned by my friend Suzi Lantz for her 100x Leadership Summit here in Canton. This time, I wanted to explore a more concentrated look at the hikers themselves. The distant hills were painted in much the same way as they were in the first two paintings. The…
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Suzi hike: #2
This is the second painting for Suzi Lantzs 100x Leadership Summit. I liked how the distant mountains worked in the first painting, so I tried to copy that here. One thing I wanted to improve on was that the first painting ended up feeling like a series of one-dimensional hills stacked up against each other.…
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Suzi Hike: #1
My friend Suzi commissioned me to paint a picture of a two people hiking in the mountains for a leadership summit she puts on. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/100x-leader-summit-canton-tickets-56654820092# She asked me to paint two people hiking on a mountain. She didnt want the hikers to be very large, because she wanted the landscape to be emphasized, but I…
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Waterfall Exercise 1: #1
This is the next exercise from Ron Hazells Painting Water with Watercolor. This was supposed to be a quick sketch to get the fundamentals of his technique for painting waterfalls, and I tried to paint it that way. I didnt do a value study first, or sketch the composition on the paper first, because I…