Welcome to my 'Works in Progress' oil painting demos section where you can see the paintings I have on my easel right now and keep up with their development stage by stage.
'Fishing boats' - 'Orangutan' - 'Fishguard harbour' - stages below.
( Updated 2nd July 2009: NEW 'Fishing boats' painting stage 2 added. )
Fishing boats 16'' by 12'' - started 29th June 2009.
Stage one.
This is a local scene located about 3 miles away on the river Tiefi estuary. Boats are always fun to paint, although getting the angles right can be quite hard at times. Some of the angles here will be corrected as I get further in to this painting.
Stage two.
In some respects the tones are back to front in this painting. By this I mean it's usually the norm to have lighter tones the further back into the distance you want things to appear. Here you can see I have the distant farmland and trees darker in tone than the foreground. I've done this to get the effect of bright sunlight hitting the foreground.
Orangutan painting 24'' by 18'' - started 4th June 2009.
Stage one.
Here are my first moves on a painting of a mother and baby Orangutan. As usual I've used a big brush and washy paint to scrub in the basic shapes and colours I want in roughly the correct places on the canvas. I'll let it dry over night now before continueing.
Stage two.
Still mostly using the same big brush ( a size 8 flat hog hair ) I've started to add to the colours and tones. If I have a particular colour in my brush I move around the whole painting putting it on where ever I think it needs to go. This saves a lot of time.
Stage three.
As I progress with a painting like this all I do really just gradually refine what I have already done in stages one and two. I continue to move around the painting working on which ever area grabs my attention as needing work. Then I just keep going around the painting this way until I'm happy to stop.
Stage four.
This painting is pretty close to being finished now. After a little more tinkering the final thing I'll do is untidy it a bit. By that I mean I'll add some random hair and highlights and generally scruff it up a little to help add a sense of movement to the painting.
Finished painting.
As I do with all my finished paintings I'll place this one on the wall of my studio for a couple of weeks now to see if anything jumps out at me as wanting to be adjusted or tweaked a little.
Fishguard landscape 24'' by 18'' - started 27th April 2009.
Stage one.
There are some quite complicated angles in this painting of lower Fishguard harbour in Pembrokeshire. I'll tackle most of those as I come to them later on but for now I'm just putting in the large areas of colour to give me some idea of the layout and shapes.
Stage two.
As I've continued to work on this painting I've adjusted and corrected the perspective from the initial layout above. This is one of the beauties of using oil paints. Effectively removing the possibility of making any permanent mistakes. Now that most of this is correct I can get on with adding more detail and colour.
Stage three.
The stage has now come where I'm starting to add the extra details such as lamp posts and the like. Not forgetting to put in the all important shadows of each added item.
