Ron Guthrie Art: Fishing Boat

Monday, April 25, 2011

Savanna May

"Savanna May"

16" X 20" Oil on Canvas

This painting is all finished up now. Took longer than normal but more importantly I've learned a few things on this one. The funniest thing I learned while painting this one was that my D40 camera does have a White Balance setting! hahaha.

I wanted to take work in progress shots while painting this but my 5 year old smaller digital camera that I've used for all of my artwork finally conked out on me. It took the best shots of my artwork simply because it had a White Balance settings. This setting allows you to choose the lighting you are working under. By reading through my manual for the D40 camera I finally found out it had this and how to find it...once I tried a few shots all worked out fine, whew!

Another thing I've learned is to get away from using a pencil for my initial sketch. Way too much messing with those pesky pencil lines so no more of that.

And finally, I'm learning to see color better...not the color things are but the colors that are actually in front of me. Water is not really blue or green....it can be brown, black, yellow, grey or any hundred other colors. What it is is right there in front of your eyes. What it's not is what your mind tells you it is. An important lesson and I'm getting the hang of trusting my eyes more and more.....and one more thing, if you paint bright red floats that have been faded by the sun you're going to end up with what looks like giant salmon eggs in your painting and there's just no way around that.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Koho, Santa Barbara Harbor

My Reference Photo taken abour a week ago.

I was trying to fight off the "boat bug" but that's not going well. Funny story, I always worked in pen & ink in my very early days doing horses, the occasional portrait and a lot of boats. During break at work I would sketch boats really quick and then add color using highlighter markers just for fun. Somewhere during all of that I thought it would be even more fun to learn to paint boat scenes using oil paint so I began to take painting classes in college. We never once painted water or boats.....to learn that I ended up going with Walter Foster books. I have wondered many times if Mr. Foster ever had any idea of just how many millions of budding artists he helped with his series of art books. There just has to be a killer story behind those books and Walter Foster....I'll be off to Google soon.
Anyway, I decided to paint one of the fishing boats in Santa Barbara harbor. I wanted a cool looking boat with some of the dock in it. I didn't want an image showing too many boats because that would need a ton of editing by me and I'm so detail-retentive that I like to leave too much in. I've seen this boat a zillion times down there and I really like her looks. Learning to handle the water was fun and I think I'm getting better at it. So much of it is really just an illusion. I thought about leaving out the floating kelp but I need to learn painting that too so in it went. Not the best looking kelp but I could have done it much worse too, hahaha.
Up top is my reference photo. Here is my final painting. I sketched this directly on the 12"X16" canvas covered panel which I hate doing when it has to be detailed. Not much room for mistakes which causes a lot of erasing. One of these days I will try painting one of these boat scenes with no initial sketch...forcing myself to paint loose as a goose.

"Koho At High Tide"

12" X 16" Oil on panel

Details of the painting.....