Blog

Wood Duck - A New Original 10 x 8 Landscape Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Wood Duck

We had a few days of rain in our forecast, so before the weather turned, I went down to the lake not far from our house to take some reference photos just in case I was stuck in the studio. Normally, this lake is full of ducks, geese and all type of water fowl, but on this trip there was just a hand full of mallards playing in the water. None the less, I began to take a few photographs of them because I was in the mood to paint some ducks anyway. While I was taking my pictures, someone arrived at the lake with a big bag of bread and began to feed the ducks. Well, it didn't take long for all the ducks and birds around the lake to start making their way towards the free lunch. Slowly, but surely, more and more ducks started to appear and that's when I spotted this one wood duck swimming with a small group of mallards. I couldn't believe my luck! I love the distinct markings on this bird and knew I'd want to paint him if I could get a good reference image of him. That proved to be the tricky part. It seems this little duck is camera-shy. It took almost 30 minutes of waiting for him to swim close enough by me so I could get a good image of him, but it was worth the wait. He settled right in front of me for almost 5 minutes! I must have snapped about 50 pictures of him during that time. What a treat!

Wood Duck © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 10x8 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Currently available through my eBay auction. Click here to go the auction.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Struttin' - An Original 8 x 8 Wildlife Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Struttin'

 We had lots of sun today, but not much warmth, so I decided to grab my camera and head down to one of the local lakes around the house. I knew that even with the cold weather, we'd still have plenty of ducks and water fowl hanging around. When I got to the lake, just about all the ducks where sitting on the shore line sleeping or trying to stay warm. These ducks are all very used to getting bread and oats from most of the visitors coming to this lake, so as soon as I crouched down to take a few pictures this duck came walking over to get his bread. When he figured out that I didn't have any, he turned and walked away. This must have tipped off the other ducks because even though it was cold in the water, most of them started heading in. I guess they thought the camera couldn't get them in the water. I noticed as soon as I left, they all started to head back on to land.

Struttin' © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 8x8 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Currently available through my eBay auction. Click here to go the auction.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Foggy Morning - A New Original 6x8 Plein Air Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Foggy Morning

 One of the things I like best about fall are the foggy mornings we sometimes get. As much as I enjoy painting out doors on a nice sunny day, nothing beats being able to paint in some sort of atmospheric condition, like fog. Rain is nice if I can find a dry place to paint from and snow offers a new look at the landscape, but, let's be honest, it's cold. Besides, anything more than a dusting of snow in Texas is rare. Fog, on the other hand, is usually fairly pleasant weather to paint in and offers a wonderful variety of colors and edges. I've been waiting for a good foggy day to paint in for a while. It seems like the last few we had I wasn't able to go out painting for one reason or another, but on this day all the stars lined up and out I went! This is from a little pond just down the road from where we live. I tend to go to this location a lot when I don't have a lot of time to paint before I think the conditions will change, like in fog or at sunset. I'm sure the commuters don't agree with me, but I hope we have a lot more foggy days soon!

 Foggy Morning © 

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.

This Is My Good Side - An original 6x6 landscape oil painting by George De Chiara

This Is My Good Side

 Just down the road from our house, we have a wonderful little lake that plays host to more ducks, geese and water fowl than I can count. In the winter months, the whole lake is covered with birds. In the summer, the flock thins down to about 50 to 100 animals. I'm not sure what it is about this particular lake that they like so much, but my guess is it's the endless buffet of bread and seed that people bring them that keeps them coming back year after year. This also makes them very friendly. There are several ducks and geese that will eat the bread right out of your hand if you let them. It's one of our daughters favorite things to do. She squeals with delight as the birds flock to her for the bread. I'll often take my camera with us to take a few photographs of the birds. It seems like this Chinese goose was determined to have me photograph this side of him since every picture I took, he had his head turned. After noticing this, the title for this painting seemed pretty straight forward.

Please note that the auction for this painting will be on Daily Paint Works. Click the link below to go to the auction.

This Is My Good Side © 

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.

Day 11 of the 50 Day painting challenge - We Need A Goose - by George De Chiara

We Need A Goose

 After yesterday's painting, I was still in the mood today to paint ducks. Only this time, I wanted to paint some real ones rather than a rubber ducky like yesterday. We are lucky to have two small ponds close to our house. Both of them attract a lot of duck, geese, swans and birds of all kinds. In the fall and winter, the population expands to close to 100 of them. With a constant supply of people willing to bring them bread, it's no wonder we have so many. We love to take our daughter there with some bread, too. The ducks will practically eat it out of your hands if you let them. Our daughter just laughs and laughs and then does her best duck quack! It's priceless. For today's painting, I looked through the photo reference I've taken at these ponds. I couldn't quite find one photograph that I liked, so I took three different images and combined a few of the ducks together in Photoshop. For an artist, a basic knowledge of Photoshop or some other photo editing software is very handy. I'm lucky to have used Photoshop for the last 16 years, so combining these images and getting things arranged is a pretty quick task. Once I had a new image to work from I was able to get started. Here's how the painting came to life today.

This is the image I'm working from today. You'll notice that the combining of my images is not perfect, but I think it's good enough to work from.

Stage 1 - The block in. I'm always amazed at how just a few strokes of color and swipes of a paper towel can resemble what I'm painting. It's one of the reasons why I favor this approach so much. In just a few minutes, I have a pretty good idea of what my painting will look like. It if doesn't look exciting to me at this point I can make changes, rearrange things or flat-out wipe it off and start over. Since I have very little time and paint invested at this stage, I don't hesitate to do any of the above.

Well, I'm not sure why I didn't more photographs between the first stage and now, but I didn't. I know I was struggling a bit with the ducks and got caught up trying to get things worked out. When I finally got to a point where I thought I had things going in a positive direction, this is where I was at. I really enjoyed painting the reflections in waters. The patterns can be quite abstract and offer a lot of color variation.

I'm just about done with the ducks now. At this point, I must have scrapped off the mallards head about 6 times trying to get it right. I still think it needs a little work, but other than that I'm pretty happy with the ducks and need to get started on the background. This is the last image I took of my progress, but I can tell you I finished the painting and placed it on my fireplace mantel to look at for a while. After about an hour or so I decided to take it back into the studio and work on the water behind the ducks and the background and it's reflection. I felt it was all a little too flat and didn't have enough value variation in it. Below is the final painting after all of my tweaking.

The finished painting.

We Need A Goose

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 10 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Ducky Tea - by George De Chiara

Ducky Tea

I started my morning taking our little girl to the doctor. She came home from daycare yesterday with a nasty fever. My wife and I spent the night caring for her and managed to get her fever down a bit, but we still wanted her to get checked out today. After I got home with her, she was feeling a little better and even managed to play a little. When she went down for a nap, I spent some time looking through her toys for ideas. Now, I should have most of them committed to memory at this point, since I spend a portion of each night picking them up and putting them away, a chore I can't wait for her to take over soon, but at 20 months I just don't think she grasps this concept quite yet. At any rate, I really like the colorful quirky little things some of her toys come with. These little tea cups are one such example. Great color and smily faces on them to boot. I already had picked out the rubber duck and thought the two of them would go together well. When I set up this still life I wanted to have some drama to the light, so I used one of the many toy bins we have to block some of the light and give the background some depth and mystery. At least I hope I did:)

Here's an image of what I'm looking at while painting this still life. Like all the other still life demo's in this blog, this is just to show you what I'm looking at while working. I painted this still life from life, which, in my opinion, lets me see much more accurate color.

Like a lot of my paintings, I start out by washing on very thin color and use a paper towel to wipe out areas of light. This helps give the very loose brush work at this point some definition and form. After I'm happy with this initial layout, I'll let everything dry for just a few minutes. It doesn't take long for the turpentine to evaporate and the paint to dry enough so it doesn't lift with the next layer.

Every painting needs to start somewhere, so for this one I started with the duck. I like the way that shadow goes across the tail and back of the duck. I feel this helps give him some depth and mystery as the duck emerges from the shadow.

Once the duck is in good shape, I can move on and work on the rest of the painting. These plastic tea cups turned out to be both fun and frustrating to paint. The colors in them are very saturated and I'm finding myself struggling to accurately capture them. This is one of the reasons I wanted to challenge myself to paint these. They force me to stretch and learn while painting. With my daughter being sick today and painting in-between her naps, I didn't take a lot of progress pictures today. Sorry about that. Hopefully tomorrow will go a little smoother.

The final image.

Ducky Tea

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 - King of the Pond

King of the Pond

 
One of the local residents at the pond down the road. This guy swam around like he owned the place. All of the other ducks followed him where ever he went., sort of like he was the king. Hence the title, King of the Pond.  He was a lot of fun to paint and a real challenge with all that white! You know I keep calling him a him, but I really don't know, my bird book doesn't tell me how to tell them apart. If anyone know, please let me know.