Development of a new acrylic painting - part 2

Here I am presenting the completed acrylic painting, which I started and posted on 18th April.

Not sure if this is what I had intended that first week, I rarely leave completing a painting to a second session let alone leaving it for so long. I normally know exactly what I am going to do and aim to complete in one two hour session.

There are fewer daffodils than I expected, and which appear in the reference work, although I do like this version and have had many positive comments from my colleagues in the art group.

I do think it has a very definite spring-time flavour, in fact much more so than the original reference painting. Is mine better? I am not quite saying that but they are different. This is always a feature of my work when "copying" from a reference; I study the original and then create a new work in my own style and do not try to copy the original exactly. In fact, quite the opposite. I select my own colours and work to my own composition. This can lead to images very different to that which I am working from.

Hope you do like this, not my usual subject matter although it is a landscape, but I think I like it. Time will tell ....

The Winged Man - After Odilon Redon

I have just got to tell you a story of an old (early) pastel painting of mine based on an oil painting by Odilon Redon.

When I first started to learn "pastelling" techniques, I used to spend time copying old masters, often oil paintings but anything was open season as far as I was concerned in a quest to develop my own style and the techniques I wanted to explore. One of the sketches which I most liked was painted using The Winged Man by Redon. I still like it and enjoy looking at it.

Today, I wanted to remind myself of the original media used by Redon for his painting, I thought it was oil but I wanted to confirm it for a post I was writing for my FB page. I googled ... and found a copy of my version on a blog which seemed to purport to be a serious art blog. I am not sure! There, some way down the page, I found my own painting amongst a large number of works by the master himself. It is actually signed by myself so how could this blogger have made the mistake? Or did he not actually know or care?

I can only assume that by posting the work onto Flickr, I have put my work out there and it has gotten mixed up with the original somewhere along the line.

Can you see my signature (JRD) at the bottom right? Just for comparison you can see a copy of the original here.

I am not sure whether to be flattered or to be angry that my painting has been used without permission, it is supposed to be copyrighted (all rights reserved) - so much for Flicker's categorisations. I think perhaps, It is slightly more the former. And we all know that most people on the internet think that copyright is something that does not apply to them.

It is interesting to see that the colours in my painting are much more vivid than in the original, something I had not really noticed before.

Development of a new acrylic painting

I decided to work "large" with this latest piece, all of 8 inches by 6 inches - well at twice as large as my post cards, it is large as far as my last few weeks are concerned. Quite honestly I was looking for some card to continue with the post-card sized theme and came across a couple of slightly larger (but quite thick) pieces. Not wanting the bother of cutting these, I decided to use them as they were.

First of all, I prepared the surfaces with an acrylic gesso. The miniatures had been painted with quite "wet" paint, the acrylic had been diluted so that I could work wet-into-wet as if with watercolour. This time I was going to work with paint straight out of the tubes to try and get a textured effect. This was because the reference photo I had chosen was a photo of an oil painting from an old art magazine, and I wanted to try to achieve the same effect. I did not want the paint sinking into the surface of the card.

The painting I had chosen to work with, was from a 1998 (?) copy of The Artist/writer was Edward Noott. A scene of springtime daffodils growing in profusion at the edge of a road (?) with hedges and hills in a distant background. Here is a poor photograph of the painting from the magazine.

In this sort of subject, well in most subjects really, I like to paint the background first and then add the details in the foreground. In this way the background can be seen through the foreground subjects and I do not have to consider what I should do in the gaps - assuming there will be some.

My background looked like this:-

Not exactly a copy but that is how I work. I take the main elements from the reference and "do my own thing" with them. Not too sure it is exactly what I had in mind but good enough to work over at the group meeting next week.

Incidentally, a few of my colleagues thought that it was worth leaving it as it is - I suppose it does have a simple symmetry with a bright and airy feeling, but I shall finish what I have started. Hope to be posting the results next week.