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For The Birds - An Original 12x16 Still Life Oil Painting by George De Chiara

For The Birds

 Lately I've been in the mood to try some larger still life paintings. While doing the smaller ones are a lot of fun and a great exercise, sometimes it's nice to stretch a little and do something a bit more involved. And that's exactly what I did. After returning home from doing a small plein air piece in the morning, I spent the rest of the afternoon gathering and arranging this still life. Like many of my still life paintings, the arrangement went through many changes, thoughts and ideas before coming together into something I wanted to paint. Below are a few step-by-step pictures of the painting coming to life. Since I'm running low on the number of images I can upload on my site I've had to combine a few of the steps into one image. Not my favorite way of having to do this, but it keeps me under my limit.

The first image was at the end of the day after I had finished setting up the still life. The only thing I had time for was to sketch in the shapes with a thin wash of (mostly) Transparent Oxide Red. In hindsight, I'm glad that's as far as I got on this first day. That image isn't cropped in, my drawing is. After thinking about it overnight, I decided to redraw the composition so it's a bit more pulled back. I had a few reasons for coming to this decision, but the main one was I wanted a bit more breathing room around the edges of the painting and I wanted to make sure the flowers in the background were visible. Since my wash from the night before was dry, I used a piece of charcoal to redraw everything and then went over that with thin washes of color as seen in the second image. These thin washes helped hide the lines from the previous nights work. Once I was happy with this composition, I was able to start in with a bit thicker paint and more refined colors and values.  I'm starting with the potted plant since it's close to my center of interest and I'm not sure how the flowers are going to do now that I took them from their sunny window. 

Hmm... these combined images get a little small. Sorry about that. I"ll have to figure out something better, but in the meantime, you can see how I moved from the flower-pot to the ceramic bird next to it in the first image. This also gave me the opportunity to finish off the background, since both the bird and plant are defined by it. By the time the second image was taken, I had just about finished the little white vase on a stack of books on the left edge of the painting. From here on out, I alternated from one side of the painting to the other to finish it up. 

For The Birds © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 12x16 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: $385 (unframed)

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Pink Beauty - An Original 6x6 Floral Still Life Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Pink Beauty

 I was just about ready to send my store-bought roses into the compost pile when I noticed that one of them still had a bit of life and color to it. It was starting to droop over a bit and I had to prop it up to get the angle I wanted for this painting, but other than that it seemed to be full of life. I really wanted to try a painting where I could concentrate of the shape of the flower and petals and this seemed like the perfect chance. Good thing I didn't wait any longer because by the next day, even this one had given up all signs of life and was starting to lose petals and wilt. I'm glad it had enough strength to stick around long enough to get this painting done! This painting is available though The Dutch Art Gallery in Dallas. Contact Pam at (214) 348-7350 for further information or to purchase it. 

Pink Beauty © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 

Price: $75 + Frame.
Frame: The gallery did an excellent job framing this.
Availability: Currently at The Dutch Art Gallery in Dallas. Contact Pam at (214) 348-7350 for details.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Pumpkin Coffee - A New Original 6x8 Still Life Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Pumpkin Coffee

 I've been do so much plein air painting lately that I almost forgot how much fun a still life is to paint. I was in the mood to do something that represented fall to me. After trying out a few different items with my miniature pumpkin, this one turned out to be the most satisfying. With the addition of a few autumn leaves picked fresh from the maple tree behind my studio, I was all set. Here is my progress:

This image was taken after about 5 minutes of painting. While that doesn't seem like a lot of time, it is perhaps the most important 5 minutes of the painting process. It's in this stage that all the major shapes are defined and the composition is finalized. Of course, while adjustments can still be made after this stage, I prefer to have this stage be as accurate as possible before moving on. I consider this to be my block in, and, from here, I'll start working on refining these shapes and colors.

Now I can start to refine my painting and attempt to finish areas of the painting. I'm starting with my center of interest since this is the area that should be most developed. From here, I can judge what level of completion I want for the rest of it. I can also make sure that the rest of the painting doesn't compete for attention compared to this area. 

Once I'm happy with the general direction the center of interest, I can move on to the rest of the painting. My approach with this is to try to complete an area before moving on. At this point the entire right hand side of the canvas as well as most of the foreground is complete. From here, I just need to finish up the left hand side and this painting is finished.

 Pumpkin Coffee © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x8 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Little Falls - An original 5x7 landscape oil painting by George De Chiara

Little Falls

 A few days ago, I went to one of my favorite spots to paint, which is the falls in West Worth.  We had a few inches of rain the day before I went, so I knew the falls would have plenty of water flowing over them. After picking out a place to paint from I set up my easel and got to work.  Try as I might, I just couldn't quite get the painting to the stage I wanted. Something wasn't jibing, but I couldn't put my finger on it, so I finished up what I could and brought the painting home for further thought on what to do. As an exercise to work out some of the things I think I need to correct on the painting, I decided to do this smaller painting first. In this case, I'm trying to work out how I'm going to handle the drop off and rocks in the foreground. I took a few progress pictures as I worked on this to share with you.

Here is how I started this painting. This is just a little wash of color thinned down with turpentine. I then used a paper towel to wipe out some of the lighter areas and went back with a slightly less thinned down mixture of paint to place a few darks. Nothing too fancy here, but I have my original plein air sketch to refer to while I'm doing this.

In this image, I'm about half way through the painting. I've worked mostly from the top down. I started by laying in the darks first and working toward the lighter values. I'm trying to work on keeping my darks transparent, which is something easier said then done. Below is the final image. While I still don't think I've worked out what I want to do with the lower rocks and water, I do like this solution.

Little Falls © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 5x7 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Days End - An original 8x8 landscape oil painting by George De Chiara

Days End

This painting is another one that I did based off an older plein air study. I've had a great time revisiting some of these subjects this week. In the time that's passed since I first painted the study I've learned a lot about painting, color, and edges. It sometimes doesn't feel that way, since most of the time these improvements come in very small increments over a long period of time, but, looking back at something I painted last year or two years ago and repainting it today has really shown me where I've grown. More importantly, it's shown me where I still need to grow, directions to push myself, and areas to study that need more study. This what I enjoy and embrace most as an artist. The learning is never done, which is makes being a painter a lifetime effort.

Here is an image of how I started this painting. I'm using a little transparent oxide red (for the most part) to work out the placement of the larger shapes. The original painting was a 5x7 inch study and this painting is on an 8x8 inch panel so there are a few things to work out first. I spent some time getting everything where I wanted it. With just a few lines of thin paint, it's very easy to change my mind and move something at this stage. Believe me, I'd rather do it now then later when I have a lot of paint on the canvas and a lot of time invested in it. Once I was happy with the placement of all the larger shapes, I knew I could move onto the color and detail.

Well, I guess that this point I'm about half way through  the painting. I'm playing around a little bit with what to do with the foreground, because I don't want it to be all water, like the original sketch was. I feel I need something to stop the eye from running off the bottom of the canvas. Usually, placing something a little darker across the bottom will stop this and let the eye move back up through the painting easily. You can also see very faintly where I wiped off my first attempt at the sky in what will be the water when I'm done. The first sky I painted wasn't satisfactory, and, before I got too far down the road with the painting, I wiped it off and re-painted it. This time, I kept my paint mixtures a little thinner on the canvas and my colors a little cleaner when mixing them.

Below it the finished painting. You can see I finally settled on having several patches of land and grass in the foreground to help break it up and stop the eye. I felt this fit with what was going on with the background grass and land very well.

Days End © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 8x8 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Available 

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Veggie Wraps - An original 6x8 landscape oil painting by George De Chiara

Veggie Wraps

 One of the great benefits of moving my studio recently is I got to rediscover all the things I stashed away for another day and forgot about, like this little plein air painting I did in the fall of 2010 of hay bales sitting out in the field. While I was never crazy about the results of the painting, I did like the subject and the general composition of the painting so I thought I'd give it another try. I didn't want to just make a copy of the original painting. I wanted to take this opportunity to make a few adjustments to the composition and colors of the scene. I also choose to make it a little large then the original 5x7 inch plein air study. Now, if you promise not to laugh I'll show you the original study. Promise? Okay good, here it is:

While I think most of the building blocks are here, I don't like the color, the general color temperature and some of the drawing is, well, less than stellar. However, I think with a few adjustments I can make a better painting.

Since overall I like the composition I had I'm going to stick with it for the most part. You might be able to see a few faint lines of where the hay bale in the back is shifted over to the right just a bit more than in the original painting. I also turned the way it is facing so we see the other side of it. I felt seeing 2 of the hay bales in basically the same position was a little boring and by rotating the background one I'm able to give a bit more variety to the piece. One of the other things I wanted to do was to break up the tree line in the background. I'm going to try to bring this set of trees that I started with and another set of the left side a bit more forward in space then the ones behind them.

At this stage, I have most of the background finished. Notice how I have almost the same shapes as in the original painting? I think this one has a lot more interest because of the wider value range and a bit more variety in the brush work. The foreground at this point is nothing more than washes of color thinned with turpentine. In fact, I even stole a little watercolor trick and put some turps in a spray bottle and sprayed the surface. If you look closely you can see the runs that it caused. In the end very little of this made it into the final painting, but it was an interesting experiment and one I want to continue to explore. Luckily, I did this right before I took my lunch break because it took a while for the surface to dry enough to continue painting.

Below is the final painting. I'm not sure the image is the best. Might have to re-shoot it in the morning and update this, but it should give you a good idea of what the final painting looks like.

Veggie Wraps © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x8 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Turkish Caps - An original 6x6 landscape oil painting by George De Chiara

Turkish Caps

A few years ago, we planted a small Turkish Cap plant in our front bed along with a few other flowers. This bed is in a difficult spot that doesn't get a lot of sun during the day, so these Turkish Caps seemed like the perfect thing to plant. As luck would have it, that winter had one of the hardest freezes we've had in a while and it came on fast. It seemed like one day we had decent weather and the next night we got the very cold freeze. Needless to say, we missed our chance to cover up the fragile flowers and plants. For the rest of the winter we watched everything freeze and die off. Then, somehow, in the spring a little sprout of Turkish Cap sprung up from the ground. It was the only plant to make another appearance. Well, fast forward a few years and that little sprout is now a giant, beautiful plant full of red blooms. It now takes up about of a third of the flower bed! For this painting I just went out to the bush and clipped off a little section to paint from back in the studio. Below are a few progress pictures of how this painting came to life.

After I roughed out where I'd place the flowers and then general flow of the painting, I started to lay in what I hoped would be the background for the painting. Sometimes I'm able to keep a lot of this in the final painting, sometimes I'm not. It all comes down to how accurate I can be with the rest of my brush strokes and drawing. If you look closely you can still see some of the makes from my rough layout. Those little red marks are where the flowers will go. I also started playing around with an old water-color trick at this stage. See the little, lighter dots? Those were achieved by spraying little turpentine on the surface of the canvas and then gently blotting it with a paper towel. It's a fun technique and one I want to experiment with more.

At this stage, I have most everything blocked in. Now it's a race against time to get the information I need from my clipping before it starts to wilt. I'm still trying to hold onto the background I had, but you can see some of it starting to slip away. The reasons pretty simple, I got a little sloppy with some of my drawing and had to make some corrections. Dang, it's hard to not make mistakes. Hahaha!

Below is the final painting. You can see I painted over most of the original background, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Turkish Caps © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 5x7 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Lures - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Lures

 For Christmas this year, my wife gave me a new tackle box. It was a much-needed gift since my last one was being kept closed with rope and twine. After 20 plus years it's served me well, but it was time to retire it. So it was with great delight that I opened my new tackle box, but the real treat was that she actually filled the whole thing with tackle. She knows how much I like to paint my lures as well as use them to fish and managed to find a nice collection of used lures to fill the new tackle box with. The old ones are just so much better to paint. Each little nick and scrape adds so much character and makes them more enjoyable to paint. Below are step-by-step images of the parinting process:

 Here's an image of what I was looking at while painting. The lures are sitting on top of a piece of glass to give a little reflection. This is a simple technique to give the foreground some interest without having to add more objects to it. Looking at this image, I notice a few things that really look different than what I saw. For instance, the little piece of fishing line on the lure in the front didn't show up nearly that well in real life and I could also see a little more reflection in the glass than the camera captured. That's why I prefer to paint from life whenever I can.

This is my rough block-in. I did this a little different then I normally do. With this block-in, I used a lot more paint and didn't thin it with turps. Instead, I used a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe some of the paint and correct the shapes as I painted. I even used some of the paint on the paper towel to tone the canvas in the foreground and creat the shadows on the ground. I did this because I wanted to try to use some of the underpainting in the final painting. My thought was that the majority of my brush strokes from here on out would be in the negative areas. Because of this I let the painting dry overnight so I could work wet on dry.

Well I've got to start somewhere, so I choose to start with the background and work my way forward. I thought that this would work the best with the approach I was trying. I tried to use as much of background green color as I could to help define the shape of the lure and where ever I could I used the initial painting. A good example of this is the tail feather/hair. Most of this is actually the original painting with just a few little strokes of color to add detail and shadow.

Just about done now. I think I spent more time on that black lure than anywhere else in the painting. It just took a while to get the look right. Too dark and it would have been a big hole in the canvas. Too light and it didn't look like it was a dark-colored lure. After a bit of trial and error, I think I finally got it. Now I just need to finish up the last lure and a bit of the foreground.

The finished painting:

Lures © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Molasses and Garlic - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Molasses and Garlic

 For the last few days, I've been thinking about doing a still life with a few of the bottles of cooking supplies in our cupboard. After grabbing the ones that I thought would be interesting to paint, I tried a few different arrangements adding a new bottle here and there and removing a few as I went. After a little while, I started to realize I needed something else besides the bottles so I added the garlic and measuring cup. Everything came together pretty quickly once I did that and so the only thing left to do was to paint it.

Here's how the painting came to life:

I took this image when I felt I had finished my rough block-in. I wanted to have a bit more color during this stage then I normally do. At this stage in the painting process, I was thinking I'd paint a little thinner in the next stages of the painting and let a lot of this underpainting show through. Well, what's that saying about best laid plans...?

Now I'm starting to refine my block-in and add more color. At this point, I'm starting to realize that I'm probably not going to be leaving as much underpainting as I thought. Oh well, this is the way things go sometimes. I've just got to roll with it and make the best painting I can. If I need to paint thicker to get things painted accurately and looking the way I want, then so be it.

At this point I'm just about done. I have a few little details I want to add in and then I'll refine and clean up any areas that I think need it. It's tempting sometimes to get into some of these final details too soon. I have to remind myself that it's better to get the larger color and values correct first. The lettering and design on the bottles is really just icing on the cake. 

Molasses and Garlic © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Strawberries and Chocolate - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Strawberries and Chocolate

 In my last blog post, I mentioned going to a church garage sale. This white heart is another one of the items I picked up at it. I think this one cost me a quarter. I liked the contrast between it and the dark background almost immediately. Now, what to put with it to finish off my arrangement? After a bit a digging around the house, I finally settled on using some strawberries, and, what goes better with a strawberry than some chocolate? It surprised me how quickly and easily this still life arrangement came together. Now all I needed to do was paint it.

Here's how the painting came about:

First, here's an image of what I'm looking at while painting. As hard as I tried I just couldn't get a good image of the set up. I can't even see the highlights on the white heart in this image. This is one of the reasons I prefer to paint from life when ever it's possible. 

Here's my really rough block-in of the basic shapes. I toned the canvas with a very thinned mixture of Cadium Red and Terra Rosa. To draw the outlines, I used the same color mixture with less turpentine and a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe out some of the light areas. At this point, I'm not really concerned with anything more than making sure everything will fit on the canvas and that I have a composition I'm happy with.

It seems like it's rare to be able to start with the thing that represents the lightest light and darkest dark right off the bat, but I lucked out with this one. Usually, it seems like I need to paint a little more of the painting before establishing these values. I have to admit that kind of luck is nice. 

Just about done now. I have to paint the chocolate hearts still and adjust a few of the edges. Edges are one of those things I really want to work on this year, so if you're a regular reader of this blog your going to hear me talk lot about them. Right now I'm experimenting with soften the edges more than I normally do, trying to give the eye places to rest and giving it a clue that it should move on from the spot it's in. To soften, I'm using a very soft clean brush and I'll just lightly swipe it across the edge.

The finished painting:

Strawberries and Chocolate © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Love Bird - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Love Bird

I love finding new things to paint, which is what inspired this painting. I had that little ceramic bird for less than an hour when I painted him. He was a score from a local church garage sale for a whopping dollar! How could I pass that up? Plus, I had already had the chocolates which I bought for some Valentine-themed paintings anyway. The two just seemed to fit together so well. Below are a few step-by-step photographs of how this image came to life.

First off, here's an image of what I'm looking at while painting. The rose is made from crêpe paper that my niece folded into a rose. I've used them a few times to stand in for real roses and they work great. Never wilt and never change shape!

This image is taken after about 30 minutes of painting. I stained the canvas with a mixture of Cadium Red and Cadium Scarlet thinned with a lot of turpentine. Then I used them same mixture with a lot less turns to drawn in the basic shapes and a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe out a few lighter colors. I give this a few minutes to dry and then started blocking in the larger color masses of the bird. 

I continued working on the bird until I was happy with his appearance, which, naturally, lead to the surrounding areas in order to get the edges that I want. 

Just about done now. Everything is blocked-in and I just need to bring rest of the painting up to the level of completeness that I want. I generally try to soften the edges and to let more of the underpainting show through as I get closer the edges of the canvas. I do this for two reasons. First, I just like the look of the incompleted painting, and, second, I feel it helps move the eye back towards the more complete areas of the painting, which is the center of interest. 

Love Bird © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Snow Irises - A commissioned painting by George De Chiara

Irises in Snow

One of the reasons I enjoy doing commissioned paintings is I never know what someone will ask me to paint. This request was one of those wonderful surprises - irises in snow. I grew up in cold climates and must have seen scenes like this at the start of every Spring, but I've lived in Texas now for so long that this image just never crosses my mind anymore. That is, until I was asked to paint it by one of my collectors. This turned out to be a bigger challenge then I thought it would be. In the end, I found it easier to paint the flowers making sure I got all the petals in the proper place and then put the snow on top of them. When I just tried to paint the snow with parts of the pedals coming out of it, it never looked right. I only took a few step-by-step images of this painting coming to life, but hopefully this will give you some idea of how I approached this painting.

I took this image at the end of my rough block-in. For me, the goal of this stage is to work out the placement of all the large shapes of my painting, making sure there is room for everything, and that I have a pleasing composition. The color is rough and is just meant as a placeholder, something to give me an idea of what colors go where, but is by no means meant to be the final color. I do try to let some of this underpainting show through in the final painting when possible since I think it lends a sense of "air" to the painting. 

Since the rough block-in is all done with very thin paint, it doesn't take long for it to dry. It's just a little oil paint thinned with turpentine, so in a few minutes when the turpentine evaporates, the paint is more or less dry. Then I can start to go back into those initial washes and refine the shapes, color and edges. You can see in this image I'm still trying to paint the snow on top of the flowers first. In the end, I scraped off this snow, painted the flower pedals and then placed the snow on top of them.

The final painting:

Irises in Snow © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Hanz and Franz - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Hans and Franz

 Well, it's official. Christmas is over. The last bell has jingled and all the decorations are put away. Things here are finally returning to some form of normal. Or at least as normal as they can be with a 2-year-old and a 5 month old. My wife is a college instructor and her schedule changes ever semester, so normal around here is always a temporary thing at best, but for now we are back on track. For the last few weeks, we've had a steady stream of visitors here at the house and now that the last one has gone back home, I'm looking forward to updating this blog and website. I've got a lot of exciting news to share over the next week or so, along with a few new paintings and tips and tricks, so be sure to stop back often.

 A few weeks before Christmas, I got a phone call from one of my very first collectors. I hadn't spoken to him in many years and had a great time catching up. Towards the end of the call, he asked if I could paint him another portrait of his latest dogs, who are two wonderful looking Saint Bernards. After a few emails following our phone call, we reach an agreement on two paintings, both of which would be Christmas presents. With time running out, I got to work painting. Below are a few step-by-step images of one of the paintings coming to life. I also will have another post on how I used Photoshop to work on my initial composition and a few other tips on how I used the program to help work on this painting.

Here is the original image my client sent me. Normally, I would have prefered to take my own reference material, but in this case that simply wasn't possible. In order to give my client a better idea of what I wanted the painting to look like, I took this image into Photoshop and adjusted the posititioning of the dogs and simplified the background.

This is what I came up with in Photoshop. You can see I cropped in on the dogs to get them a little larger in frame and moved them closer together. I also eliminated all the background since none of it really supported the image of the dogs. From this post on, this is the image I based my painting on. In fact, I never looked at the original image again until I started writing this blog today.

Here is my initial wash and drawing on the canvas. Since I had adjusted my reference image to be the same proportion as the painting, I used a simple grid method translate the image. Once I was happy with the drawing, I let it dry for a day or two. This wasn't really by choice, I had a few other things to do and couldn't get back to the painting for a day or two. This did have a great unexpected benefit. The drawing had completely dried so once I started painting I was free to wipe off areas I didn't like and not lose my initial drawing. This came in handy, since about an hour into the painting I wiped off everything I had started and started over.

You can see in this image some of the evidence of where I wiped off my initial work and the dried drawing showing though on the right side of the dog's head. At this point, I'm trying to nail down some the drawing and establish my light and dark colors.

At this stage, I'm just about done with the dog on the left. As I worked on the one of the right, I did occasionally go back and make a few adjustments to the other dog. Notice too how I'm trying to leave as much of the original wash in for the background as I can. I am adding slightly thicker paint, but for the most part I want as much of the wash to show through as possible. I didn't take any images of the other dog in progress. I got really into painting him and sort of lost track of time. I basically painted him in much the same manner as I did the first dog, starting the nose and eyes and working out from there.

The finished painting.

Hans and Franz © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 11x14 inches on linen panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

A Little Christmas Cheer - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

A Little Christmas Cheer

 I've been looking forward to this time of the year for a few months now. Our oldest daughter, who's just 2 years old, is just starting to understand Christmas and the holidays in general. Almost every night before bed for the last few weeks, we've read her current favorite book, Santa Mouse. So it's been with great anticipation that I've been looking forward to getting the Christmas decorations out. Not only do my wife and I get the great joy of explaining all the traditions and mysteries to our daughter, I get a whole new set of subjects to paint for a few weeks.

 I only have a few step-by-step photos today because I scraped off my canvas about half way through the process. I didn't clean the canvas off; rather, I just scraped off as much of my previous painting as I could and then re-painted it. I did this for two reasons. First, I had started the painting on Tuesday and wasn't able to get back to it until today, so the paint had become a little tacky on the canvas. Plus, I wasn't happy with what I had painted and felt I could a better job if I scraped it off and started over.

This image was taken after my very quick block in. I'm really just scrubbing on a little bit of color in the general area things will go. Then I can use a little turpentine on a paper towel or even just a soaked brush to wipe off highlights and make small adjustments to some of the volumes.

Here, I'm a little more than half way through the painting. This was about the point I was at before I scraped off the previous painting and started over. The surprising thing is that it didn't take that long to get back to this point once I started over. There was still a little underpainting left on the canvas and I had already painted it once, which always seems to make things go fast when I do them again. You might also notice that a few of the ornaments that are blocked in didn't make it into the final painting. As I was finishing up the painting, I felt I really didn't need them in the painting, so I took them out.

A Little Christmas Cheer © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Guard Duty - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Guard Duty

 About a year or so before I actually starting painting still lifes, I started to collect things that caught my eye as something I might want to one day include in my paintings. As any still life painter will tell you, we all love our "stuff" and usually have it stashed all over the studio. You never know when you will need just that perfect thing to complete your still life. You'll find us hunting through the thrift stores for that must have tea-cup or bowl or even the odd knickknack. I've noticed that sometimes I use what I buy very quickly; other times, things that looked good when I bought them seem to lose their appeal once back in the studio and are doomed to sit and collect dust until I notice their charm once again. Well, that little statue in this painting was one of the first things I ever bought for my still life collection. I actually have two of them, along with a few other little figures that I got for $2 at an estate auction almost 3 years ago. Then, there it sat on the shelf in the window collecting dust. I tried it in a few other set ups over the years, but it never really worked out so I always removed it and put it back in its place. Well, I'm happy to report after three years, I finally used this little guy in a painting! Hopefully another three years don't pass before I use it again. 

Here's how this painting came to life:

I took this image at the end of my rough block-in. At this stage there's very little paint on my canvas. I mostly just thinned my paint down with a little turpentine and used a paper towel to wipe out lighter areas, like the vase in the upper left and the statue in the lower right.   The reason I like this approach is because it very quickly gives me idea of the overall colors of my painting and a fairly accurate layout of all the objects in it. From here, I can concentrate on each section of the painting and know that I'm not going to run out of room for everything in the painting.

I let the rough block-in dry for a few minutes. Once the turpentine evaporates, it's more or less dry. Then I start painting. Since I'm fairly confident that the placement of all my objects is correct I can bring the objects I'm painting to an almost complete state. I do go back and make some small adjustments as needed while I finish, but most of these areas are done now. I started with the statue since it's my center of interest and I want to judge the rest of the painting against it. It's also one of the more difficult things to paint, so I figured I'd get it our of the way first. This way if I need to wipe if off and start over I don't risk messing up areas I already painted. Notice how many other objects the statue leads to just to get it painted correctly. Most of the foreground is done in front of it and a large part of the background needed to be done to complete the statue.

In this image, I continued working on the background, almost in a counter-clockwise order. The reason I did this is I like to rest my hand on the canvas when I paint and by leaving the foreground till the very end I'm able to do this without smudging the paint. One thing that doesn't show in these pictures is one important step I did so I could paint that blue ribbon in. First, I drew the edges of it with a little bit of paint so I knew where it went. Then I took my palette knife and scraped off any paint that's under the ribbon. I even used a paper towel to wipe off some of the it. Then, I could paint the ribbon cleanly without having to layer on the paint. I don't have anything against thick paint, but I want to use that effect where I want it and not just to cover up the paint under it.

Guard Duty © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 9x12 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Contact me to purchase ($230)

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Winter Tracks - An original oil painting be George De Chiara

Winter Tracks

 This painting started off as a demo painting for the Ellis County Art Association last night. I had a great time painting and talking with the artists there, but, despite my best efforts to paint as fast as I could, I didn't have enough time to finish this painting. In fact, I would say in the hour I painted last night I made it to only about the block-in stage. Nothing had any detail to it and a few areas had some drawing mistakes that would need to be corrected. Since I was happy with the start I had made, I decided today I would take the painting into the studio and finished it off. Here's what the painting looked like at the end of the demo:

You can see at this stage most of the painting is still pretty rough. When I started working on the painting again today, the first thing I did was take my palette knife and scrape off any of the thick paint on the roof of the taller barn since this was one area I wanted to work on the most and I didn't want the old paint interfering. I also scraped off a bit of the thicker paint on the snow for the same reason.

Winter Tracks © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 9x12 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Fruit Stack - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Fruit Stack

 Back in the studio today. It's been a few days since I've painted indoors. My last few paintings were done outdoors, but I had set this still life up a couple of days ago and really wanted to paint it once and for all. I actually attempted this one right after I set it up, but about half way through that painting, I wasn't happy with what I had. Today I started over with a new approach. Okay, that's not totally true. I tried this new approach the last time I attempted to paint this still life. Like I said, it didn't go well, but with the knowledge of where I went wrong last time I approached my easel once again hoping to get a little further this time.

Here' s a photograph of what I'm looking at while painting. I use to paint from photographs a lot and now I'm amazed every time I look at one like this. There's so much the camera doesn't capture. That's why it's important that I work from life as much as possible. It's the only way I know of to learn to really see what your subject looks like, and, more importantly, how to compensate for a photograph when I have to work from them. Things like the shadows are much darker and void of color compared to what I was looking at.

I took this photo at the end of my rough block-in. My goals are a little different for the block-in today. I wanted to try to keep it very loose and just have rough, clean color. My hope was to try to keep some of this as I refine the painting. In the end, I wasn't able to do this, but it's an approach I want to keep working at to see if I can make it work.

Well, you can see it didn't take long to cover up some of my rough block-in with more opaque or thicker paint, but that's okay. New approaches take a while to work out and I learned a few things that I'll try to apply on the next painting. Now my goal is to try to complete the painting as best I can.

At this point, I have most of the fruit blocked in and mostly finished. Now I'll get ready to complete the wooden box on the left side of the painting and then I'll finish up the foreground. Once that's done, I added in the blue berries.

Fruit Stack ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 5x7 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Pumpkin Trio - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Pumpkin Trio

 I finished this painting late Friday night and had meant to post this entry sooner, but it's been a very busy weekend around here and this is the first chance I've gotten to write this blog. I really wanted to do one more painting of all the little pumpkins and gourds we bought this year. They really area a treat to paint because of their wonderful colors and variety, which keeps me on my painting toes. 

 We've tried for 2 years now to grow these pumpkins ourselves, but, so far, we haven't had much luck. The first year we tried our crop was destroyed by vine borers that we didn't catch in time. Really, we only had about a day to catch the little nasties before the damage was done and the plant dies. But gardening optimism never dies around this house, and, this year, we had a really promising crop going. We even had a rather nice medium-sized pumpkin ripening on the vine when a hungry racoon wandered by and ate it. Then, as you may have heard, Texas had a record-setting summer for heat and almost no rain. No matter how hard I tried to keep the patch going, the conditions where just too much for the plants and we lost everything towards the end of August.  The garden hose is just no substitute for rain and rain barrel systems are dependent on that magical nectar from the sky. I hoping next year, our third time trying, will be the charm.  We are, after all, ever optimistic.

Here's how this painting came to life:

This picture was taken at the end of my rough block-in. There's very little paint on the canvas at this point. Most of this is completed with a little color thinned down with turpentine. The biggest advantage of this approach is the paint is more or less dry when the turpentine evaporates and it really doesn't lift when I paint on top of it. I can also make changes very easily with just a paper towel dipped in turpentine. This is how most of the lighter areas are achieved.

Well, you have to start somewhere, and, for this painting, I started with the yellow and orange pumpkin in the back. This turned out to be the second most difficult one to paint, but more on that later. Once I had  a pretty good start, I started to work on the background and adjusting the shape of the pumpkin.

I continued to refine the background a bit more before starting on the white pumpkin. This one turned out to be the most difficult one to paint out of the three. I was seeing so many different colors in it that I really had to slow down and take my time with my mixing to get it. In the end, I'm not sure I got all the color variety I was actually seeing, but I'm pretty happy with it.

The finished painting:

Pumpkin Trio ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Howdy - An Original Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Howdy

 Last week, we were at the Fort Worth Stockyards. I couldn't help but take a few photographs of the cowboys riding around on their horses and getting ready to drive the cattle down the street. I rarely paint this type of subject matter, but it's good to stretch occasionally and push in new directions. With this in mind, I decided it was time to try to tackle the challenges presented by these two rugged figures of the cowboy and his horse. I loved the lighting in my reference image. It's very strong and cast a great shadow of the cowboy hat across his face. That and the wonderful contrast in the outfit he was wearing made this painting a joy to paint.

Below is how this painting came to life:

This is my block-in today. It's a bit more detailed than I normally do for this stage because I wanted to make sure I had the correct proportions of the figure and the horse. I also wanted to paint with simple, strong brush strokes where ever I could, and, without a pretty clear idea of where those brush strokes need to go, they inevitable get overworked with corrections.

I let the block-in dry, which only takes a few minutes since it's painted with paint that's thinned down with turpentine. Once the turpentine evaporates, the paint is fairly dry. I started with the cowboys face and hat because, well, might as well get the most difficult part out of the way first.

I continue to work on the cowboy and his horse getting the basic shapes and forms worked out before tackling the background. I'll use the background to help correct some of the drawing mistakes and adjust the edges of the cowboy and his horse.

Howdy ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x8 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Natalie's Pumpkin - Original oil painting by George De Chiara

Natalie's Pumpkin

 Last year, I painted one of these small pumpkins and named it after my then one year old daughter, so it only seemed fitting that I use my newest daughter's name for this year's small pumpkin painting. She's way too young (2 months old) to have actually picked out this pumpkin, but it's the smallest one we have this year and it seemed fitting to name it after her. What attracted me to this little one was the stem. I loved that it had that little stringy bit and that I could pose it almost any way I wanted to for my painting.  I had to be careful though; I accidentally broke off one of the little vines off of it while working out this arrangement.

Below is how today's painting came to life:

First off, this photograph will show you what I was looking at while painting this today. I think I may have had my camera a little low when I took this image, but it's close. You might notice that I simplified the bit of vine that's still on the pumpkin in the painting. In the end, I felt that was just too busy and went with a simpler version of what was there.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in. Yes, it's very rough at this stage, but I wanted to see if I could keep things a little looser in the beginning and still get the result I wanted. With that in mind, I felt this was all the block-in I needed to before getting started with more defined painting.

I started with the pumpkin with large simple shapes once my rough block-in had dried a little bit. First, I defined the light areas and then the shadow areas. From there, I kept refining it by building up the form as I went along. I only painted the foreground colors when I needed to define and correct the outer edges of the pumpkin.

Natalie's Pumpkin ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Fragile - Original Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Fragile

Fragile is the latest painting to roll out of the studio. I actually finished this one a few days ago, but things have been super busy here and I'm finally getting a chance to write my blog post about it now. I'm not really sure what inspired this one. I was playing around with a few different objects in my shadow box trying to come up with something that I liked when I noticed that most of the things I had grabbed were all glass. Hmm..., I thought, that might be an interesting idea. All glass! What do I have to lose? So I immediately went to work finding all the interesting glass objects in my collection of still life objects. I spent an hour or two trying a few different arrangements before focusing on and fine tuning this one. The last touch was to add a little colored water into bottle on the little plate. Then it was time to paint. Below is how this painting came to life:

First off, here's a photograph of approximately what I was looking at while painting. Some of the color is really lacking in this image. When I was painting from this arrangement, it seemed to me that the green bottle was a little lighter in color, with a lot more yellow in it and that blue bottle in the foreground was a lot darker. This is one of the reasons I prefer to paint from life when ever it's possible.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in, about 45 minutes of painting time. The goal at this stage for me is to make sure I can fit everything on the canvas that I want, and to get a very rough indication of the color and shape of each object. I'm using a mixture of paint thinned with turpentine, color mixtures with white added to them, and a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe out areas of the canvas to create shapes.

Once the block-in is finished, I give it a few minutes to dry so when I start to paint on top of it, the colors don't lift and blend. I'm starting with the glass bottle in the foreground. I think this is a good place to start since it has some of the lightest lights in it and some of the darkest darks. It's also the area I want to be my center of interest.

I more or less worked across the canvas, concentrating on the glass objects. I figured once I had those done, the rest of the painting should go pretty quickly. Once I got to this point, I felt I had all the glass objects well under control and mostly finished, so I concentrated on finishing up the foreground and then give everything one last once over.

Fragile ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 9x12 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Pumpkins - an original oil painting by George De Chiara

Pumpkins

I love this time of the year. The weather finally starts to cool off, the leaves start to change, and the pumpkins go on sale for Halloween. I just love all these miniatures varieties they have out now. When I was a kid, the only type I remember where those that you could carve. Now don't get me wrong, I like those too, but for paintings, I tend to go for the miniatures. They have great color patterns and come in all kinds of colors. Plus, they are a lot of fun to paint so when I ran across these the other day at the gardening store, I just couldn't pass them up. Today, I finally got a chance to use them in painting. Below is how today's painting came to life:

This is what I had set up in my shadow box while I was painting today. The painting is cropped in a little tighter than this image of course, but this will give you a pretty good idea of what I was looking at.

This image was taken at the end of my block-in. Like most of my block-ins, there isn't much paint on the canvas yet. I'm just thinning the paint with turpentine and using a paper towel to wipe out the lighter areas. I did use a little white in my mixtures at this stage, which is something I don't normally do.

Once the block-in is done, I can start refining the painting. I'm starting with the little bird's nest wood carving and the things that surround it. This is going to be my center of interest, and, by starting here, I can better judge the rest of the painting's color and edges to make sure they don't compete too much with this area. The other reason I wanted to start here is because of the wicker bowl that the little white pumpkin is sitting in. I figured this would be a challenge to paint and I want to get that well under control before getting too far into the painting process.

I continue to work out from my starting point, trying to complete each passage as much as possible before moving on. Once I get everything more or less to this point. I'll go back over the painting and make small adjustments where they are needed. You might notice that I painted over the red ribbon that was blocked  in at the beginning. Sometimes I find it easier to paint things like that over the other shapes rather than trying to paint around it. This decision was a little easier to make since I didn't have a very good block-in of the ribbon.

The finished painting:

Pumpkins ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x8 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Moving Hay an original oil painting by George De Chiara

Moving Hay

In yesterday's post, I talked about how I used Photoshop to prepare my reference images for a painting. Today's post is all about the actual painting. I tried to take these pictures at what I thought were the sort of major points of the painting process so you can see how the painting came about today.

This is the end of my block-in stage. I have a few different ways I'll start a painting, and, sometimes I just do a simple, very rough block-in of the major shapes and then go right into more finished, direct painting. This is the method I'm using today, so this is as far a I feel I need to go with my block-in. At this stage, there is very little paint on the canvas. I just thin it down with turpentine to lighten the color. From there, I use a paper towel to wipe out lighter areas and to spread the paint around a little, like in the foreground. Since this paint is very thin, it will dry to the touch in a just a few minutes.

Because the tractor is the most demanding part of the painting and its major shape, I wanted to start with it and get it correct before moving on to the rest of the painting. Truth be told, this is my second attempt at getting to this stage. In my first attempt, I made the tractor way too large, so I made the decision to wipe it off and start again. This is why there's so much brown color in the sky right now.In hindsight, I wish I had blocked in this shape better when I started. It would have saved me a few hours of painting time.

From here, it's really a coin flip as to which to finish first...the background or the foreground. I chose the background since I needed it to really finish off the edges of the hay bales. This also gave me a little more time to think about how I wanted to approach the foreground. Initially my thought was that I'd leave a little more of the foreground unfinished than I did in the finished painting. Sometimes it's too easy to keep saying, "Just one more tweak here and I'll be done." Well, that's exactly what happened today. Still, I'm happy with the way the foreground came out and the painting overall.

Moving Hay ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x8 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Composing with Photoshop by George De Chiara

 Perhaps the single most useful program I've ever used on my computer is Photoshop. Now, don't get me wrong. I've used some extremely high-end graphic packages - the stuff capable of making all those special effects in the movies, but for an artist there's almost nothing more useful than Photoshop. You can use it for developing all those digital images you take, preparing files for shows, creating website images and promotional materials, and for composing the next painting. That's the topic I want to cover here briefly. The other uses would make great blog posts on their own, so we'll leave them for another day. This blog does assume you have some basic Photoshop knowledge and can find your way around the program fairly well. Hopefully you'll pick up a few tricks and ideas on how to use this application to improve your work.

 Here's the photograph that originally inspired me. It's a little rough from a painting point of view, but I think I can make something of this. I took this image a few weeks ago while visiting with our in-laws. That's actually my father-in-law driving the tractor out on his ranch bringing hay to his very hungry cows in south Texas.

Okay, so to make this a more paintable subject, I want to crop in more tightly on the tractor. There's too much space around it on the right hand side and along the bottom. The first thing I do is create a digital matte by creating a new layer in Photoshop. Then I use the marking guides and rulers to mark off an area that's the size of my intended painting or that has the correct proportions of my painting size. In this case, I'm going to be doing a 6x8 inch painting. I do this rather than crop the image, since it gives me flexibility throughout the process to continue to adjust which part of the image I use. If I just cropped it right off the bat, I would be stuck with that portion of the image the whole time or forced to start over later if I wanted to make a change.

Notice how my selection area (those marching ant lines) isn't centered? I do this, because at this point I'm not sure what part of the image I want to use, but I do know the size I want in the end. So by making the correct size first, I can move the selection area around my image until I find the approximate area I want to paint. It doesn't have to be exact at this point. I can fine tune it  later on. The important thing at this point is that I have the correct size, or aspect ration. Once I find the approximate area I want to paint, I invert my selection and then fill in this area with black. This gives me my digital matte. Now I can duplicate my background layer (the original image) and move it within my digital matte to fine tune the area I'm going to paint. You might have to rearrange your layers so the digital matte layer is on top of the duplicate background layer.

Here's where I'm at so far. Notice I also moved my guides so I can see where the center of my image is. Now I can move the background copy layer around until I'm happy with my composition. You might also notice that the foreground has changed a bit in these images. Truth be told, I added that little suggestion of a path in the foreground at the end by using the dodge and burn tools. When I was deconstructing my Photoshop file for this blog, I realized I had done this on the base layers, so for now just ignore that they are there.

So far so good, but now I'm not very happy with the tree line. I don't like that the taller trees are on the same side of the image as the tractor. It makes the image feel too heavy on the left hand side. To try to balance that out a bit I'm going to flip the trees horizontally. The first thing I do is use the lasso selection tool to roughly select the trees. It doesn't have to be super accurate at this point. I'll clean it up later. Once I make the selction, I can just copy (CTRL + c) and paste (CRTL + v) it, and Photoshop will automatically put it in its own layer. Then I can use the menu Image>Image Rotation>Flip Horizontally. The trees don't look very good at this point, but after adding a layer mask and feathering them back into the other layers, it's pretty hard to tell they've been flipped. Here's what it looks like:

Things are starting to come together now, but there's still a few things I think I can improve before I start to paint. First off, that sky is just way too plain with not a cloud in sight. Now, I know Texas is in one of the worst droughts it's had in a long, long time, but I like to paint clouds when ever I can, so I'm going to add a few in. First thing I need to do is find an image that has a sky I like and that has about the same perspective as the image I'm working on. Here's the image I choose to use. This is actually from North Texas ,but I won't tell anyone if you don't. :)

This image also has the added benefit of having a grassy foreground that may just work to add a little more variety to my foreground. I simple drag this image into my Photoshop file and it's automatically placed on a new layer. I re-arrange the layers so the clouds are under my digital matte layer and then I turn the transparence of the layer down a bit so I can see some of the image below it. This allows me to adjust which part of this image I'll use. Once that's dialed in, I'll turn the transparency back to 100 percent and add a layer mask. When I make this mask, I set it so everything is hidden and then slowly paint the mask out to reveal the clouds and a little bit of the foreground.

Notice the slightly greener foreground now? That image worked out rather nicely. I'm just about done now. There's only a few things I want to do before I start painting. The first is to pump up the color a little bit on the hay and grass. It just looks a little too drought-stricken for my tastes. To do this, I'll duplicate the background layer one more time. Just make sure the one you duplicate is the one that's already in the correct place. In this case, I duplicate the layer called "Background copy". I then adjust the color of this layer using a variety of the tools under the menu Image>Adjustments. In this case, I used Vibrance to get more color into the layer. It can be a little over the top since I'm not going to use the layer as is. I'll add a layer mask to it and lightly paint in a few spots to bring the color up.

Ah, that's better. The very last thing I did, like I mentioned above, was to add the hint of a path in the foreground. It's an old trick to lead the eye into the painting and one that's easy to over do. I want there to be just a slight suggestion of the path in the final painting to have enough to break up the foreground a bit and add something of interest to it.

 Well, that's just about it. The only other thing I'll do before I start painting is to actually crop the image to the size of my painting. Now on to the painting! Check back tomorrow for a step-by-step blog on how the painting goes.

Apples and Peaches. A step-by-step demo by George De Chiara

Apples and Peaches

In yesterday's post, I talked about how I came up with this arrangement of objects for the still life below. Today's post is all about the painting decisions. Like my other process blog posts, I tried to take pictures at each major step.. Now, let's get on with the demo!

Since one of the things I really wanted to work on is my accuracy in drawing what I see in front of me, I started this painting with a line drawing. Admittedly, the drawing is rough, but this should be enough to get me started down the right road. I'll continue to adjust the shapes as I paint them and get everything to "settle" into place on the canvas. That's one of the wonderful things about painting in oils; I can continue to adjust and refine my painting until I'm happy with it.

I love to get the color work as fast as I can. For me, this is the most exciting part of the painting; however, I don't want to sacrifice accuracy for pretty colors, so I did this very rough color pass to get everything blocked in and establish my color harmony. There isn't much paint on the canvas yet. This is all done with very dry paint scrubbed onto the surface. Some of this paint will show through when the painting is finished. Other parts will get wiped off and started over as I progress with the painting, but for now this gives me a pretty good idea where things are and what color they are.

Once my rough block-in is finished, I can start to refine the painting more and spend time getting things drawn accurately. Notice how the blue bottle has moved slightly to the right and the apples have settled into their place. That peach on the far left will need to move too. I didn't notice in my block in, but I have it way too high in the picture and there isn't enough space between it and the watch, which is leaning on the box. I didn't actually notice this until I had the whole peach painted (after this image was taken). I then had to scrape it off and move it. Not sure why I didn't notice it before I painted it, so I'll chalk that one up to laziness, the painter's enemy!

Just about done now. Notice the new position for the peach on the left? It looks much happier there doesn't it? I know I'm happier with its position, since I can fit the blue ribbon into place now. For me, this ribbon is a very important part of the painting. It can take the eye from the edge of the painting right into the heart of it, so being able to accurately fit it in is important.

The finished painting.

Apples and Peaches

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 8x10 inches on linen panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Painting 50 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Tools Of The Trade - by George De Chiara

Tools Of The Trade

Painting number 50! I can't believe it; I made it! For this last painting, it seemed appropriate to use some of the equipment I've used for the last 50+ days to make these paintings. One of the things that made this painting an interesting challenge is that the palette that everything is sitting on is the one I use every day, so I had to use a different palette while painting today. I didn't think this would matter, but it turns out I've developed a lot of muscle memory as to where each color is on my palette. Most of the time, I don't even think about where a color is, my brush just goes right to it. However, with this new palette I had to stop and think about where the color I wanted was before reaching for it. This made me think about my color mixtures more than usual, thus keeping me on my toes while painting.

Here's how the painting came to life today:

This is the end of my block-in. Everything at this point is roughed in with very thin color. The lighter areas are wiped out with a paper towel dipped in a little turpentine. While this stage looks rough and unrefined, all the important details are addressed in this pass, such as the placement of each object and where the lightest lights and darkest darks will be.

Once the first pass has had a few minutes to dry, I can start to refine my drawing and colors. I started with the brush cutting across the canvas, since this is the primary focus. This is also what I'm judging the size and placement of rest of the objects from. I'm using a combination of dry brush strokes and ones loaded with paint at this stage. For example, the brush is painted with thicker, wet paint, while the medium cup that it's sitting on is done almost entirely with dry brush stokes over what was already there.

I continue with the lower portion of the painting in the same way, using wet and dry brush strokes to develop it. The tubes of paint are painted with thicker wet paint, but for the palette, I try to use dry brushes so the color from the initial wash will show through. This helps gives the painting some depth and interest.

The finished painting.

Tools Of The Trade

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Painting 49 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Trails Edge - by George De Chiara

Trails Edge

 This painting is based on a photograph I took several years ago while out hiking with my wife on vacation. We were in Oklahoma at the time, following a trail in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge when I noticed this little rock outcropping along the trail we were on. I was struck by the light-colored rocks against the dark background of the forest and snapped a few photographs to remember the scene by. I'm not sure what made me remember this images today, but I'm glad I did. Little landscape scenes like this are loads of fun to paint. Below is how the painting came to life:

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in. There's still very little paint on the canvas at this point. I started by toning the whole canvas with a little Viridian and Yellow Ochre thinned with turpentine. While this was still a wet, I used a paper towel to wipe out the rocks. I then used slightly thicker paint to rough in the trees in the background. This is still very thin paint without any white paint at this point. I'll let this dry for a few minutes before continuing.

Now that the rough-in has had a few minutes to dry, I continue working on the whole painting at the same time with very dry brushes and paint mixtures. This allows me to build up layers of paint and color, along with lots of texture, which is just what these rocks need. By working on the whole painting at the same time, this painting came together faster than I thought it would. Since the painting flowed so well, this is the last image I took before it was done.

The finished painting.

Trails Edge

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Painting 48 of the 50 Day painting challenge - It's A Girl! - by George De Chiara

It's A Girl!

 Well, if you've been paying attention to this challenge, you'll know that I'm actually over the 50 days mark. I had to take a few days break when my wife went into labor with our second child this past weekend. Our due date was supposed to be about 5 days after the painting challenge was to end, but our little girl just couldn't wait any longer and made her début on Saturday afternoon. I'm only three paintings short of my goal, so I'm definitely going to finish it up over the next few days. I've thought about changing the name of the challenge to 50 paintings and a baby in 55 days. What do you think?

 Below is how today's painting came to life. Can you guess where my inspiration came from today?

I completely forgot to take a picture of my still life set up before I broke it down, so I'll start this step-by-step blog with my block-in. For this painting, I did a monotone block-in. This is done mostly by toning the whole canvas with a little Transparent Oxide Red mixed with a touch of Terra Rosa. This is thinned down with turpentine and wiped with a paper towel to smooth it out. I also use the paper towel to wipe out some of the lighter areas. I used the same mixture with less turpentine added to it to draw in a few darker lines and masses of the objects.

I give the block-in a few minutes to dry so that underlying color doesn't interfere with the paint I apply over it. I'm no longer thinning my paint with turpentine at this point. Now I'm concentrating on getting accurate color and drawing. I started with the Minnie Mouse rattle, since this area is my center of interest. I want to be able to compare everything else against this area in terms of color saturation, edges and contrast. My goal is to keep all the other parts of the painting just slightly less interesting than this area.

Although I don't want to detract from the center, the background is still important. These areas should lead the viewer's eye through the painting and back to the central focus so I'll give these areas just as much attention.

The finished painting.

It's A Girl!

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 46 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Where the Water Runs Rapid - by George De Chiara

Where the Water Runs Rapid

 Today I painted one of my favorite subjects, white water rapids! It seems like it's been forever since I've done one. I'm not really sure why I've had the lapse, but today I put an end to it. I shuffled through my photo references of scenes like this till I found one that I wanted to paint. This scene is from Medicine Park, OK. My wife and spent a week there a few years ago and had a great time hiking around the trials and sight seeing. We took a hike called the 40 Foot Hole Trail, which follows a river for about a mile and a half and is full of scenery like this. Ultimately, the trails ends at a 40 foot hole at the bottom of the river, which is created from the waterfalls pounding down. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not sure if we ever found the hole or not. It's not very clearly marked which waterfall supposedly caused this, but with a digital card full of images like this one I really didn't care.

Below is how today's painting came to life. I don't have a lot of images for this one. I was short of time today and painted as fast as I could and often forgot to stop and take photographs. This was one of those paintings that fell off the brush and when you are there to just catch the paint, it's best not to stop.

This image is taken at the end of my rough block-in. The paint is not quite as thinned out as I normally use for a block-in, but it's not thick either. There isn't any white paint used up to this point. All of the lighter shades are either done with turpentine to thin the paint or a paper towel to wipe the paint off leaving just a stain of light color. When I paint from this point on, I want to try to preserve as much of this under painting as possible, because I think it will help give the rocks and water subtle layers of color and interest.

Now I've started to add white paint into my color mixtures and almost no turpentine. This makes the paint very dry, so when I drag it across the canvas, it leaves little spots where the background colors come through. The effect is most notable in the rocks as they progress. At this point, all I've worked on is the water. Once I'm happy with how the water looks, I'll move on to cleaning up the rocks, giving them more interest and color. I'll mix the colors for the rocks in the same dry fashion I did for the water. It's kind of ironic, but when painting very wet rushing water I like to use mostly dry slow brush strokes. Weird, huh?

The finished painting.

Where the Water Runs Rapid

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 45 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Pearl Necklace - by George De Chiara

Pearl Necklace

 Last night my wife came into the studio after I was done painting for the day and mentioned she had an idea for a still life painting. She then set down 3 or 4 bottles of perfume and a pearl necklace. At the time, I didn't really notice how they looked  since I was busy finishing up some other tasks. This morning, I went into the studio to get the day started and noticed the little pile of goodies she left in there. I was immediately drawn the way the bottles looked. I cleaned out my still life from the day before and set up this arrangement. I had never thought to paint these little bottles before even though I see them sitting on the vanity everyday. I suppose that this is a rather pointed reminder to look at the shapes of things, and not what they are when looking for subjects to paint.

Here's how today's painting came to life:

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in. Rather than my normal block-in for this painting, I used more of a line drawing, which is mostly monochrome in color. I really didn't have any reason for doing it other than I just felt like mixing it up a little today.

I began this painting with the blue bottle since I'm using this one to judge the size of all the other objects in the painting. This bottle is a lot of fun to paint. It has just enough translucency so you can just see through it and a nice reflection to it. This combination makes it pretty easy to just squint at it and see simple, clear shapes.

I took this image at the point where I had pretty much finished up the top half of the painting and have a block-in on the lower half. Most of the background went pretty quickly, so I didn't take a lot of photographs in-between this photo and the previous one. For the necklace and little brush, I used a paper towel to wipe out the shapes after roughing in everything else first.

The finished painting.

Pearl Necklace

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 44 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Fresh Bales - by George De Chiara

Fresh Bales

 For today's painting, I turned to one of my old plein air sketches for reference. I know a lot of artists work up their plein air studies into larger studio works, but this is the first time I've tried this myself. One of the things it made me realize about my plein air paintings is it's more important, to me anyway, to record more accurate color notes. The drawing can be refined later, but the color can only be captured out there on location. The other thing I need to remember to do is to take a photograph of the scene I'm painting for future reference. Still, it was an interesting experience trying to work from my old sketch. It gave me the chance to address some of the things I wish I had done differently while out painting on location. Plus, I got to revisit a subject that I enjoy painting. I could still recall many of the details from the day I did the initial study, like the heat from the pavement I was standing on while painting and the smell of the horses nearby.

Here's how today's painting came to life (again):

This is the old plein air sketch I used to base today's painting on. I took a lot of liberties with it when I re-worked it today. First off, I lowered the tree line to give a little more room for the sky. Then, I also tried to give the trees a little more definition and interesting shape. I also rearranged the hale bales. Finally, I changed the lines in the field to run left to right across the canvas rather than vertically like they do here.

I did a little sketch before I began to paint to work out where things where going to be. Once I was happy with that I started with this rough block-in. Like most of my block-ins, this is done with paint thinned down with turpentine and a paper towel to wipe out lighter areas.

After a few minutes, the rough block-in is dry and I can start to paint over it without lifting any of that underlying color into my current paint mixtures. I started with the sky because I find it easier to paint the trees over the sky than it is to paint the sky around the trees. It also just seems to be the way I approach landscape paintings. I almost always start at the top of the canvas and work my way down.

Here, I'm continuing to work my way down the canvas. These are pretty early color choices, as I'm working out the final placement of the hay bales. Once I'm happy with where they are, I can begin to refine the colors in the field and the hay bales. While this isn't the way I'd plan to paint the field, what I did shortly after I took this photo is wipe off most of the paint with a dry paper towel. This produced some nice light color and dried the canvas a bit. From there, I went back over the field with a lot of dry brush strokes of color and slowly built it up again. I don't think I could have ever planned this method, but it  seemed to work in the end. I find I do this from time to time, when I've built up too much paint on the canvas too soon. How do I know it's too soon? Usually, if I attempting to lay in what I still consider base color and it's mixing with what's already on the canvas, then I have too much paint applied to the canvas. If it's a small area, I can just take a paper towel, lay it over that area and gently rub the paint off. On larger areas, I just wipe it off the canvas.

The finished painting.

Fresh Bales

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 43 of the 50 Day painting challenge - A Cluck Off The Old Block - by George De Chiara

A Cluck Off The Old Block

 While painting this today, I realized that the rooster in the background is probably the father of this younger chick. Ever since my wife's grandparents got a couple of roosters last year, their chicken count has really started to increase. In fact, the last time we were there, they had more pullets (young chickens) running around than anything else, including this one. Given the similar coloring and timing, I'd say it's a safe bet that he's the father. That's where the name comes from, rather than a chip off the old block, I changed it to Cluck. Get it? Hmm...maybe I'm spending too much time going over animal sounds with our 21 month old daughter.

Here's how the painting came to life today:

I took this photograph at the end of my rough block-in. This step is normally done fairly quickly, maybe 10 - 15 minutes of painting time. The paint is thinned down with turpentine so I can paint fast without needing to load up my brush again with paint. I also use a paper towel to wipe off areas for two purposes: first, I want some places to be lighter, and then to smear some of the paint to kill the white of the canvas. You can see this in the background streaks.

I let the rough block-in dry for a few minutes; that's really all it takes for the turpentine to evaporate and the canvas to dry. Then I begin painting with thicker paint. My goal now is to get more accurate drawing and color on the canvas. The rough block-in has laid out where everything is going to be, so I can now work slower and try to be more accurate.

So, I got the painting to this point and then took a break for lunch. After lunch, I wiped off the entire lower half of the painting. I wasn't happy with the little chicken's color and I felt the foreground was getting way too dark. Sometimes it's just easier to wipe things off than it is to try to paint over them. In fact, I've noticed lately that I tend to wipe or scrape off areas without even giving much thought these days. It's one of the greatest advantages of oil paints, so I might as well take use of it.

The finished painting.

A Cluck Off The Old Block

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 42 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Changing Lures - by George De Chiara

Changing Lures

 I've turned to my tackle box several times during this painting challenge for models to paint. For this set up, I once again called on it, but this time I used the whole tackle box. I wanted this to have the feeling of slightly spilled or unorganized, like the fisherman has tried out many different lures to see what interests the fish. Sometimes he puts them back in the box, sometimes just getting them close to the tackle box is good enough. Hmm... this is starting to sound like some of my fishing trips.

Here's how this painting came to life:

Here's a picture of the set up. I did take a few liberties with this while painting it. For instance, I didn't like the green and yellow tail on top of the edge of the tackle box, but I needed to have it there to keep the rest of the lure in place (that part that goes across the handle). Sometimes, even when painting from life with something I have complete control over, I still need to edit what I see. I prefer not to have to do that, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block in. The block in is painted with very thin paint just to get the placement of the large shapes. I do this with a combination of a large brush to get the big masses and a smaller brush to get better drawing details. I also use a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe out lighter areas.

Once the rough block in is dry, I being to refine the painting. I now start using thicker color. I started with that little yellow lure hanging over the side. I choose this spot to start, since it would help define the values of the tackle box since on one side of the lure is the lightest color of it and on the other side is one of the darker values for the tackle box. By getting these two values so early in the process, defining the rest of them is pretty straightforward. I just compare the value to the two existing values to determine if it's lighter or darker.

Just about done now. Since I had a lot of color mixed already for the tackle box, getting to this point was pretty quick.  In fact, it seems like a lot of the colors I need are already mixed on my palette already. The silver spoon, for example, hanging in the front of the tackle box is reflecting colors that I've already mixed to paint other objects in the scene. The same is true for the other one that I haven't painted yet in the image. Even most of the yellow color of the lure in the foreground turned out to be a combination of the yellows that I've already mixed of some of the other lures.

The finished painting.

Changing Lures

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 40 of the 50 Day painting challenge - How'd Ya Get Up There - by George De Chiara

How'd Ya Get Up There

 I can't believe I'm down to the last 10 paintings for my 50 paintings in 50 days challenge. It makes me want to do a NASA style countdown for the last paintings. 10...9...8...Well, you get the idea.

 For today's painting, I again turned to some of the fruit I bought yesterday at our local farmer's market. It took some time to come up with an arrangement I was happy with. I initially started off with some tomatoes and onions, and nope, didn't like that. Next, I tried a few lemons and limes... but, no I just painted limes yesterday. Hmm... how about these peaches? They have lots of great color to them, I especially like the one with the yellow stripe across the top. And maybe a plum to go with them. Ah yes, after an hour or so I finally had something to paint. Now I just needed to paint it! Below is how the painting came to life today.

Like most of my step-by-step blogs, here's an image of what I'm looking at while I paint. You might also notice that I took a few liberties with the blue foreground. Rather than painting it like it looked, I used one blue color for all of it. Once I got into the painting, I realized I didn't really like the darker blue color so I make it all the same.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in. Lately, I've been doing this with two brushes. The first pass is done with a large brush to get rough mass of the objects. Then, I go back over everything with a smaller, finer brush to refine the drawing a bit more. Since these paintings are relatively small (6x6 inches), even a small brush can cover a lot of canvas quickly, especially when the paint is thinned with turpentine. It's almost like painting with watercolors during this stage.

Once the rough block-in dries for a few minutes, I can begin to paint with thicker paint. This is also the first time I'll add white to my color mixtures. I started with the peaches mostly for one reason - I wanted to make sure I had a good handle on them before getting too far into the painting, just in case I need to scrape them off and try them again. I was a little worried about getting that fuzzy peach color on the first try.

Once I had the peaches under control, I could start to expand out to the other pieces of fruit. The plum is one of my favorite pieces of fruit to paint. If you really look at them they have very rich colors and the skin has a bit of shine to it, which picks up the colors around it. For this one, I used mixtures of Alizarin Crimson with Viridian and Ultramarine Blue.

The finished painting.

How'd Ya Get Up There

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 39 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Citrus Party - by George De Chiara

Citrus Party

 Today I found a new source for my models. It's a little farmer's market just around the corner from our house. They opened a few weeks ago, and I finally had a chance today to go and see it for myself. It's a tiny store, run by a very kind older gentlemen who showed my around the place and talked at great length about his produce. After looking around for a little while, I bought a few oranges, tomatoes, lemons, limes, plums, peaches, and a cantaloupe and even a mango. When I got home I was very excited to set a still life with my new models and go right to work. This arrangement came together pretty quickly, as it just needed a few adjustments and away I went.

 Here's how today's painting came to life:

Here's a photograph of about what I'm looking at while I was painting today.

This picture was taken at the end of my rough block-in. This process usually only takes a few minutes to get to. I'm working with paint thinned down with turpentine. My goal here is to get a good feeling of where all the objects are going to be and to make sure I have room for it all. I use a paper towel to wipe out lighter areas and to blend some of the paint together. For this one, I took a smaller dry brush and painted in some of the shadow areas, like in the limes and orange in the foreground.

Now that the rough block in is done, I can begin to refine the painting and start to add in color with thicker paint. For me, thicker paint doesn't necessarily mean thick paint; it's just paint that isn't thinned down with turpentine anymore. I started with the orange, since that's my center of interest. This is also the area that's going to have the strongest color, so by starting here I can better judge the rest of the painting's colors and values.

Once I was happy with the area that the orange is in, I must decide where to go next. I choose to paint the area above the orange because of the plate in the background. It's very close in color and value to the vase, and I wanted to make sure I could distinguish between the two. I find it easier to do this by starting with one of the objects and then stepping the values and or temperature up or down for the other object. The other reason for my choice was simply that I'd have about a third of the painting more or less done by completing this section.

Once the plate was done, it just made sense to work on the vase next. I still have the colors for the plate on my palette in case I need to do any touch ups on it. Plus this leaves the bottom of the canvas clean and dry, so if I need a place to rest my hand while painting I don't have to worry about putting it in wet paint. It was at this stage that I started to work on the bottom left corner of the painting. Once it was done, I went back over any areas that needed adjusting and added in any remaining details, like the blue  design on the vase.

The finished painting.

Citrus Party

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 37 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Jump Up - by George De Chiara

Jump Up

 For today's painting, I wanted to work on reflections, so I put a piece of glass on the bottom of my still life box. The reflections help give the foreground more interest without the need for additional objects. Plus, there just fun to paint! Now I just needed to find something to paint, so I went to my favorite source, the veggie drawer in the kitchen fridge. I quickly found these two apples and stacked them on top of each other to carry. As soon as I did, I knew that's how they needed to be painted, so I brought them to the studio and set up my still life. Still, I thought it needed something else, so back to the kitchen I went to grab a cherry. I liked the difference in sizes between the cherry and apples and how the cherry has a very long stem, while the apple has a very short one. I forgot to take a picture of the still life before I broke it down, so you'll just have to take my word that I was looking at two apples stacked on top of each other with a cherry next to them. Below is how the painting came to life:

This is the end of my rough block in, which I did this in several passes. On the first pass, I blocked in where the apples would go with very rough loose color. Then, I took a paper towel and wiped the wet paint, which is how I got all of those color streaks in the background and foreground. This pretty much removed the initial block in, so I again roughed in the shapes of the apples and cherry.

I waited a few minutes for my rough block in to dry. It dries quickly since there's very little paint on the canvas because it's mostly turpentine with little color added. I started with the green apple, since it's the medium shape. Getting this correct will help me judge the size of the other objects more easily. I'm also trying to let some of the initial wash come through in the background and foreground. I think I've mentioned before that I like the feeling this gives a painting, if I'm able to do it.

Once I'm happy with the size and shape of the first apple, putting in the second one goes pretty quickly. I make sure to use the colors from the green apple in the red one wherever I can. I also make sure to use the colors from both apples in the background and vice versa. This helps unify the painting by not having any one color in just one spot. I will also use these same colors, with a lot of white added to them, for the foreground when it comes time to paint it.

The finished painting.

Jump Up

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 32 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Almost Ripe - by George De Chiara

Almost Ripe

I've waited a day or two for these bananas to ripen a little before painting them. If you live in a part of the country that's getting the same kind of heat we are here in Texas, then you know if doesn't take long for them to go from green to ripe to needing to make banana bread. I could almost see them ripening before my eyes. I even changed the lights I use in my still life box to ones that don't get as warm so they wouldn't brown as I painted.

 I find placing bananas in a still life very challenging. First off, they are very long, so in a small painting like this they can cut the picture in half, if I'm not careful. My eye always wants to follow the curve of the banana so I also need to be careful to not have that be too distracting. After playing around with a few different possibilities, I finally came up with this set up, which is in the still life box, placed almost on the floor. I like it because I think it solves both of the issues I usually run into. By viewing my set up from the top down, I took out most of the curve issue with them. I also used the single banana to lead the eye from the edge of the canvas back towards the center of interest. What do you think, does that work?

By the way, if you need a good banana bread recipe, let me know, my wife makes a great one! 

Here's how the painting came to life today:

My very loose block in. Originally, I was hoping to let a lot of this wash come through in the final painting, but you'll notice I got a little thick with the paint as I went along. I was able to achieve some of this in the background towards the upper right corner and a little in the blue area to the left of the bananas. Next time, I'll have to be more careful to have more of it come through to the end painting.

Well, where else could I have started if not for the bananas? With them being so large in the picture and the center of interest, if they come out well, none of the other painting really matters. At this stage, I'm still blocking them in and working out the colors and drawing.

I'm just about done at this point. Once the bananas were finished, the rest of the painting went pretty quickly, which is why there aren't any images of it progressing. Notice how I was able to leave a little bit of that background wash showing through it the background. I think it helps give those areas a sense of airiness. It's a challenge to be able to leave little areas like that for me. I've got to remember to paint with a slightly drier brush so I don't cover everything up.

The finished painting.

Almost Ripe

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 31 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Papa's Pin Cushion - by George De Chiara

Papa's Pin Cushion

When setting up yesterday's still life, Lost Buttons, I pulled out this pin cushion, but it just didn't fit in with the set up I had so I put it aside for today. My wife's grandfather (Papa) built this in his work shop a few years ago. He's quite the wood worker and loves to share the things he builds with everyone in the family, and, of course, we love to get them. Almost every room in our house has something he has built, like wooden puzzles and night lights for our little girl's room, wooden bowls in the dinning room, candle holders, and even our Christmas tree is decked out in custom hand-made ornaments every year thanks to him. Now, let's get on with the painting!

 Here's an image of my still life set up so you can see what I'm painting. I didn't think about it at the time, but a lot of the things I choose to put in this still life are very similar in color and value. Normally I do a better job of mixing it up, but somehow that thought escaped me today. While this isn't really an issue, it did prove to be very challenging to paint.

 This is my block in for today's painting. It's a little different then my normal approach in that it's almost more of a value sketch and drawing outline. I was a little concerned with everything fitting on such a small canvas, and I had hoped the line drawing would help me with this issue. 

Once the placement for everything is worked out, I begin laying in some color. In this image, you can see I've started to experiment with how I'm going to paint the background. I don't really have any interest in painting the pattern that's there because it's just way too busy and I'd spend the day just painting it. Instead, I want to use what's there to make a little more abstract, soft background.

If you look closely, you might notice that the little bit of the background I'd previously painted is gone now. I felt the colors had become a little too gray, so I scraped it off and re-painted it. This is about the point that I'm starting to realize how close in color and value my still life is. Getting those wooden spools on top of the wooden pin cushion to work out has really been a struggle.

Here you can see that I've scraped off some of the paint where the background spools are going to be. I actually did this for the blue threaded spool and buttons, as well. It's just easier than trying to paint over what's already there.

The finished painting.

Papa's Pin Cushion

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 30 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Lost Buttons - by George De Chiara

Lost Buttons

 I have to admit, I know very little about sewing. I know you have to put the thread through the needle, but that's about it. The few times I've had to sew on missing buttons, I almost always had to have my wife fix them for me. She and my mother-in-law are the sewers in the family. Since my wife and I share our studio space, I see a lot of sewing equipment all the time. I just love these little wooden spools of thread she has. I like to think of them as stringy tubes of paint with irresistible color. Every now and again, I like to take out some of them and use them in my still life paintings. They are a treat to paint since I hardly ever run into these colors in anything else. Below is how today's painting came to life. 

Here's an image of what I'm looking at while painting. One of the things I'm really noticing the more I take these photographs is just how off the colors are in the image compared to what I'm seeing in real life, especially in with the reds. I always knew this was the case with photography, but I never really studied it before. I guess that's another one of those unexpected things I've learned during this painting challenge.

This image was taken right after I completed my rough block-in. For me, the purpose of this stage is get the placement of all my objects nailed down. I'm (obviously) not concerned with drawing or color yet. I just want to know everything fits on the canvas and that there aren't any major compositional problems. Most of the painting at this point is done with just a bit of paint thinned with turpentine and a paper towel to wipe out lighter areas.

I let the block-in dry for a few minutes and then I began painting with thicker paint. Since the block in is dry, I don't have to worry about that color being picked up in this stage. I started with a very traditional oil painting approach here by painting back to front. This means that I started with the very back most objects and work my way to the foreground. The reason I choose this approach is because it's almost always easier to paint a color on top of another color then it is to paint around another color. For example, I wanted to be pretty free with how I painted the dark blue cloth in the background and not worry about messing up the pin cushion. If I had painted the pin cushion first I would have had to make all of my brush stokes go around it rather than just letting them go through it. When I was ready to paint the pin cushion I used my palette knife to scrape off some of the blue paint that was in the area of the cushion first. I did the same thing when it was time to paint the spools of thread in front of the pin cushion.

Here I'm continuing the painting just like I started, by painting the objects in the back first and then the objects in front of them. You may notice that I didn't do this with the spool of blue thread behind the pin cushion.  Of course this way of doing things is not a perfect science; rather, it's just a general approach to painting. Sometimes, I'll miss something and have to paint it in afterwards.

The finished painting.

Lost Buttons

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Day 28 of the 50 Day painting challenge - What's That? - by George De Chiara

What's That?

 On one of our trips to the Texas Gulf Coast, my wife and I stopped by a small dock that offers chartered fishing trips just to nose around.  We were looking for some pelicans to take pictures of and this spot had a few. While I was busy photographing them, one of the charter boats came in and was followed very intently by a pod of pelicans and flocks of seagulls. At first I wasn't sure why these birds followed the fishing boat back into harbor, but then they started cleaning the day's catch and it all made sense. The birds knew that fishermen would throw the fish inners into the water for them where they would swoop into the water after the easy meal. It was a sight to be seen, and I quickly snapped off picture after picture. At one point, I glanced up at the top of the little cleaning shack and noticed the entire roof line was covered in gulls. I was struck by the way they all looked lined up wing to wing, and how they seemed to lean over the edge to watch the fishermen as they worked.

This is my block in today, which is little different then my usual block in. For today's painting, I started by giving the canvas a wash of Transparent Oxide Red with a little Terra Rosa last night. Then this morning I started by taking a paper towel dipped in a little turpentine and wiped out the lighter areas you see in this image.

Since the background color is dry from the night before, I can start to paint over it with thicker paint. Once I have the first seagull worked out a bit, I can start to make better decisions with the other two. You can see in this image how I've made a few indications where the other two will be. I've also drawn in a few important lines in the structure they are standing on. I wanted to make sure I had some of that detail worked out too before getting too far along on the painting.

I continued to work out from the first seagull towards the edge of the canvas, trying to tighten up the placement of my shapes, colors and edges.  I wanted to keep the edges of the gulls loose to mimic the wind going through their feathers. I'm hoping this will help give the painting some movement in the end.

At the time this image was taken, I was just about done the the seagulls. I'll make a some small adjustments to their beaks, but I have mostly completed them and need to concentrate on getting the rest of the painting finished up. The background needs a lot of work at this stage, so that's where I spent my time working.

The finished painting.

What's That?

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.