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I Know Kung Fu - An Original 8x8 Rooster Oil Painting by George De Chiara

I Know Kung Fu

 My wife's grandparents have a small chicken coop with maybe 20 chickens and this one lone rooster. They had a few other roosters at one time, but that's a story for another day. Every time we visit, I make it a point to bring my camera along in the hopes of getting a few good images to paint from. This has proved to be more challenging than I thought since for one thing the chickens don't really like strangers too much to start with, and, two, we always go there with our daughters who are 3 years old and 18 months old. If you ever want to see chickens run in every direction possible, bring along 2 little girls whose idea of good time is to see how many of the chickens they can chase at once!  

I Know Kung Fu © 

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

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 20 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Hey There Little Red Rooster - by George De Chiara

Hey There Little Red Rooster

The other day on Facebook, some of my fans made suggestions of some things to paint during this challenge. I loved the suggestions and feedback from them. While I have a pretty good list of subjects already, I really like a lot of the suggestions and plan to use what I can.  One of my fans mentioned they would love to see a painting of a Rhode Island Red Rooster. It just so happens that I have some pretty good photo reference from our grandmother's chicken coop of her rooster. I didn't know it at the time, but her's is a Rhode Island Red. Since I was thinking about doing this for the challenge anyway, things couldn't have worked out better. If you'd like to join my Facebook fan page you can do so by clicking here. FYI: I haven't really announced this yet, but when I reach 200 Facebook fans I'm planning on doing a drawing for a free 6x6 inch painting. 

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

Here's the photo I'm working from. This rooster is the friendlier of the two she has and seems to almost pose for pictures, like this one. The other rooster, who's a different breed, seems happier running around the coop chasing all the hens.

This is my block in today. I used a bit more paint then I normally do in this stage because I really wanted to get some of the colors to blend on the canvas.  I find this makes painting the feathers a little easier since the mixing can often look like feathers overlapping. I just need to look for them and make sure they make sense with my photo reference. Even though I'm using more paint than normal, it's still very thin so I can wipe it off if needed and I can let this dry for just a few minutes and work back into it without any fear of it lifting.

 You know it's kind of weird, but I finally realized today that I actually prefer to paint wet into wet to start (my block in) and the wet into dry for my rough color pass and finally wet into wet to finish. Until I started writing these step-by-step blogs, I would have said I paint wet into wet all the time.  Like I said, just a weird little thought that popped into my head today. Now let's get on with the demo...

I started with the head today. I wanted to make sure I got it placed correctly on the canvas right off the bat since rest of my drawing will be based off of this. The other reason I started with the head is I usually find them the most challenging thing to paint so I like to try to get that under control early in the painting. This way if I need to scrape off parts of it or all of it, I'm not going to mess up the other areas around it too much since I haven't done much with them yet. In this painting, that turned out to be a good thing since I scraped the beak and top of his head off about half way through painting the head. Once I thought I had the head under control, I started working out from there.

At this point, I'm working across the upper half-ish portion of the canvas. I'm not going to paint everything that's in the background, since that would make the painting a little too busy and take away from the rooster. I will use some of the color cues from the photograph, but I'm going to try to keep it pretty simple.

I'm pretty happy with the background now, and I've just about finished up the rooster at this stage. I need to add in his legs and feet still and paint the foreground. Most of this went pretty quickly so I didn't take any other progress images. Once I have everything painted to some point of completion, I went back over the whole painting and made my final adjustments and tweaks.

The final image.

Hey There Little Red Rooster

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 9 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Everywhere A Chick Chick - by George De Chiara

Everywhere A Chick Chick

 My wife's grandparents started to raise chickens a few years ago and now have quite a flock running around the yard. I think they started off with just a few chickens, maybe 5 or 6 and now they must have over 30! And let me tell you, 30 chickens lay a lot of eggs. Every time we visit with them, we bring home six or seven dozen eggs and now we are thoroughly spoiled.  We'd like to have a constant supply of the eggs, but, unfortunately, her grandparents live about six hours away.  

In any case, every time we go there I like to go out back and take some pictures of the chickens. I love painting them, but can't do it from life. They just move around way too much. Now, to be fair, I'm not sure if they just like to move around or if it's my 20 month old daughter trying to hug them that makes them move.  Either way, I'm forced to use photo reference when painting them. For today's painting, I looked through the many photographs I've taken until I found one that I felt had a good pose. Why did I choose this one? I thought it would work well with the square format I'm using for my painting challenge. I like the profile view of this chicken and I was really drawn to the color of this one. She's been in the coop since almost the beginning and lays the prettiest red/brown eggs. By the way, does anyone know any good recipes that use a lot of eggs?

Here's how my chicken started out. I doubt this answers the age-old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, but this is what came first for this chicken. I'm just using a little paint with a lot of turpentine to wash in the larger shapes. Since I don't have much paint or time invested at this stage I can easily make changes and refine the placement of my shapes.

At this stage, I'm still using thinned paint. It's not as thin as the previous stage, but still very thin. I'm trying to get a nice wash of color into the chicken. My thought is that I can build on this to create the feeling of feathers without having to paint each feather. You can see around the head I've started to use a little thicker paint. Thicker may not be the correct word, really, I've just stopped using turpentine in my mixtures.

I think you can see in this image how I'm building up the feathers on top of the loose color I laid down earlier. I've also started on the background. Since it's going to be a pretty large dark shape, I wanted to get some of its color in now so I can better judge my values in rest of the painting.

I'm just about finished at this point. This is about where the painting is when I start to finalize everything in it and finish up the foreground. The feathers on the tail need a little more work, but for the most part I'm done with the chicken.

The finished painting.

Everywhere A Chick Chick

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.

Daily Painting - Meme's Chick

Meme's Chick

This little red is one of the dozen or so laying hens my wife's grandmother (Meme) is raising this year.They are very entertaining to watch. I spent about an hour in the pen photographing them. Obviously painting them from life would be a little harder than I was up for, especially for the first attempt. I think if I do a few more, I may be comfortable enough to try them from life, but for now, my photos will have to do. One of the things that really amazed me about the chickens was the wide variety of color they have. Some of them have these great red/yellow color schemes like this girl, while others are very dark with lots of blues and purples.