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about them, news of upcoming
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such as painting sales.






  19 October 2009  
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Time to read this newsletter: about 4 minutes.

Hi Everyone,

The Winner is...

The winner of this newsletter's painting prize is...
Joanne Redshaw from Auckland, New Zealand! Congratulations Joanne - I hope you enjoy the painting.


Out & About

If you've been following me on the blog you'll know I've been getting out and about a fair bit in the past few months. We've been to Rarotonga and Queenstown and a few other places. Keeping busy with workshops, commissions, online lessons, my 34th birthday (woosh) and the general hum of domestic life.


Health & Safety Warning - Scooters

Last week I took a nasty fall off Luke's scooter while racing down to the beach for what was going to be my first swim of the season. I sped onto the boardwalk doing about mach 5 and was smoothly accelerating to the speed of light when my back wheel slipped out on the 'grippy' plastic mesh flooring. The laws of physics triple teamed me - Gravity slammed me down like a fat kid on a Smarty, Momentum pushed me along like Thomas the Tanked Engine hitting the nitro and Time dutifully slowed to a crawl so I could witness my own glorious destruction in high definition. (should have been a writer)

Concrete would have been preferable - the grippy lumps in the plastic took me apart like Wolverine vs Playdough. There are better ways to lose weight. I patched myself up and discovered that I couldn't hold a paintbrush for an entire week (Shock!), but I could still move a mouse so I worked on my painting lessons instead. The lesson I learned - take it easy on corners with slippery plastic mesh, because they won't take it easy on you.

Stay safe till next time,
Richard

Note: If you can't see all of the painting at once, press F11 to maximise your browser window.
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           Newsletter Prize click to enlarge
 
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Mastering Color Lessons
The past few weeks I've been working hard on my Mastering Color video course - you can see chapter one for free here: www.livepaintinglessons.com/colour.php

Amazing how long it takes to produce these things - the hardest part is figuring out what to teach because color is such a vast subject and there are so many different ways of approaching it. Variety is the spice of life as they say so I've been enjoying having all these different creative outlets - very spicey.

 
 

Boats, Queenstown
10 2009
Oil on Canvas
76 x 76cm
$3500

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Painted this in one day back at the studio from a photo in Queenstown - had to clamber down a muddy bank to get this shot, but well worth it. I was following an idea I've continued to be intrigued by; letting loose brushwork be defined and made real by the contrast of seemingly fine detail. Also trying something new for me with the composition here - normally I try to simplify my composition and make it as clean as possible so everything reads neatly. This painting is leaning towards making a painting for a painting's sake - for the beauty of the shapes, colours, lines and textures within it, rather than making a painting for the beauty of the thing it's representing.

 
 

King of the Castle
10 2009
Oil on Canvas
76 x 76cm
$3500

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Here's another working through of the style concept I mentioned in the previous post - allowing loose brushwork to be made real by the finer detail in the painting. It's also about making my painting stand by itself instead of relying on the viewer's knowledge of a specific place to carry the work. In other words I'm trying to make it more about the beauty of colour, shapes, line and texture rather than a depiction of a scene. Learned some really interesting things in this painting - pushed myself out of my comfort zone - highly recommended.
 
 

King of the Castle
10 2009
Oil on Canvas
76 x 76cm
$3500

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Tried to really push the colour and brushwork and spent a lot of time trying to get the infused light effect of the sky pushing past the edges of the Pohutukawa tree. To do that I painted a pure blue layer first blocking in the shapes, then a darker layer just inside that one, painted the sky into the edges a little, then redarkened the inner after 2 day's drying, then built up the bark texture within that staying very close the to dark value (just a little lighter and warmer), put in some very cool blue reflected lights in the shadows, built the light areas with very thick paint and then blurred some edges here and there working the sky back in to the edges.
 
 
Thanks for your continued interest in my art.
If you have any comments or questions please contact me.

Kind Regards,



Richard


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