Susan G. Komen Laugh for the Cure Charlotte Painting

The Laugh for the Cure  virtual auction is now open through Thursday, March 19 at 9 pm. Visit our website for more information, and click here to see. all the fabulous items and packages. Keep your calendar free for Thursday evening, when we go LIVE on Facebook with special guests hosted by our emcee Molly Grantham.

This is the custom painting I created for the 2020 Laugh for the Cure event. It shows the beautiful Charlotte Skyline with the buildings lit Komen Pink. The fireworks exploding into the night sky are Komen Pink as well. The original fine art piece is 30 x 20 inches painted with acrylic paint on canvas. The painting goes around the edge and is ready to hang, no frame needed. 

I started with a pencil drawing on canvas. 

 Next I traced the pencil with ink to create the dark values. 

This is step one of the painting process. The paint is very transparent allowing the underlying drawing to show. The light green in the lower part of the sky is the smoke from the fireworks.

Step 2 shows more detail in color with the fireworks begun and the lights from the buildings shooting up into the sky. 

The last step shows the banner hanging on a lamp post with the Susan G. Komen logo and typography. My signature is in the lower right.

Vicarious Exhibition: Fire Series

The Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art is hosting an exhibition of art by Veterans. I am one of the featured artists and veterans. These paintings from my fire series will be in the exhibition. The above watercolor is titles Cave Fire. The fire in this painting illuminates petroglyphs from the American Southwest. It is 18 x 24 inches. I used a layering technique which resulted in over 20 layers of color.

Fire Light, Acrylic on canvas.

Flame, watercolor on paper.

Fire Series

Here is another painting in my fire series.  This is a small painting, 8 x 12 acrylic on canvas.  I painted around the edge on this one, even putting my signature on the edge.  In the ground, I used some of the metallic paints from Golden paints.  This adds a great reflective quality to the an otherwise less important part of the painting. I am very happy with the many layers in the back ground.  There are parts of the back ground that are very dark violet in contrast with the bright orange flames.

Charleston Memories close to the finish

Added a lot more detail in the fore ground leaves. 

Added another color of blue in light blue areas.

Added turquoise to palm branches. 

Added many small branches in the sky. 

Pumped p light green leaf highlights. 

Added see-through areas in leaves so you can see the swamp. 

Added a lot of rose to the boat.

Added more netting. 

Business Journal Illustration

This painting, Golden Skyline, has been published in the Charlotte Business Journal Book of Lists in the December 2012 issue.  The painting is oil on canvas and 14 x 11 in size.  The painting is available for sale at $590 and on display at my studio in the Charlotte Art League.  The League is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 to 3; closed on Monday; Saturday 3 to 8, and Sunday 3 to 5. 
Call (704) 376-2787 for Charlotte Art League exact hours.  The painting appears on page 8 of the magazine.  This painting is part of my on-going Charlotte Cityscape series. 

Mid Painting Corrections

For me at least, paintings never go perfectly. And that's OK. I took some photos of the process to correct a mistake in this large painting. The first image in this blog shows my initial sketch of the model. This is conte pencil on newsprint paper. In this drawing, I got the mouth and nose correct. In the middle of the painting, I stood back and looked long and hard. Also my classmates and the class instructor, Cornel Rubino, looked at it with a critical eye. We decided that the mouth and nose were wrong in the painting. The mouth was idealized and not a good representation of the models mouth. Sorry, I did not take of photo of how it looked then. So I examined the model's mouth and nose more closely and did a sketch. The model had a very large upper lip and a small lower lip. The second image shows this sketch. The nose is good, but the mouth is still wrong. Try, try again! Image three shows the second sketch of the mouth. This is it! So then, I painted the mouth and nose again. I also modified the edge of the face near the mouth. Image four shows a close up of the final mouth and nose. The final image above shows the scale of the final painting.

Size Matters

This is a painting I am calling Insolent Boy. I painted it at the Arrowmont School for Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. I spent a week at Arrowmont in a class taught by Cornel Rubino. He was a great instructor: meeting each student where they were and encouraging them to advance on their artistic journey. It was a fabulous class where I painted very differently from anything I have done in the past. The class focused on large paintings; all the paintings were at least 7 feet tall. Each day of the week I completed a painting. On Monday I did a pastel drawing of two figures nine feet tall by four feet wide. Tuesday I completed a horizontal painting in acrylic of two figures 9 feet long. On Wednesday, I did a nine foot tall acrylic of a rock star. Then on Thursday and Friday I worked on the painting above. It is on two pieces of paper for a size of 7 feet square. I painted directly from a model. This painting took two days to complete using a ladder a lot of the time to reach the high places. This is about 3 layers of paint, though some areas like the lower right hand corner have only one layer. I allowed the paint to drip when it did it naturally. The photos above are in my studio in Charlotte. I had to re-arrange everything to get this painting up on the wall. I am still working to hang and photograph the other nine foot tall paintings.