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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.

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

Red

 For the last few months, I've watched a pair of cardinals that come to eat from the bird feeder just outside my studio window. I'm not sure if they see me looking at them through the window or if the cat scares them off, but either way, they never stay for very long.  I've thought about painting one of them for a while now and today seemed like the perfect day for it. I had hoped they would stop by while I was working so I could look at them for reference, but I guess they had other plans. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them in a few days now...hmmm...I wonder if it's time to refill the bird feeder?

Red© 

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.

Jake - A New Original 6x6 Horse Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Jake

 A friend of ours was kind enough to invite us out the her parent's ranch for the day last spring. I had hoped it would be a day of painting, but brought my camera along just in case. We also brought our daughters  who were not quite 1 and a little over 2 along with us. While that seemed like a good idea, it did make painting just about impossible. Good thing I had my camera with me. I was able to take tons of pictures of their horses, ranch, and fields of wildflowers that were in bloom when we went. Of course, like any good father, I also took a ton of the kids playing on the ranch. Our friend had mentioned that she might like me to paint a commissioned painting of one of the horses. Since I had never done a portrait of a horse, I thought it might be a good idea to try one out in a smaller scale and see how it goes. That was about 2 months ago, when I started this painting. I was able to get it to about 70% complete, but couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. I knew it was lacking something, but being unable to put my finger on it I set the painting aside to think about it and do some research. I read many pages about horse anatomy and studied a lot of other pictures and painting of horses. Finally today, I felt like I might take a shot at finishing this one up. I'm glad I did!

Jake © 

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.

Flamingo - A New Original 7x5 Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Flamingo

 At our zoo, one of the first groups of animals you come to are the flamingos. You can smell them from the moment you enter the front gate. If you've ever been around a large flock of these birds, you know the distinct and powerful smell I'm referring to.  One the day I took the reference photo from this painting, most of the flamingos where busy building their nests in the sand for their eggs. This was the first time I've seen this and it was fascinating to watch as they built tall towers of sand to lay their eggs in. Apparently, this one got a little hot and thirsty while working and decided to go for a little swim to cool down. I took a few photos of him (or her) playing in the water before returning to the sandy shore to continue work on the nest. I had hoped we'd be able to return after the eggs had hatched, but I think we missed our chance. I'm sure they hatched some time ago.

Flamingo © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 7x5 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Koi - A New Original 6x6 Plein Air Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Koi

I learned a lot about Koi fish during this painting. For example, I learned that it's very difficult to convince them to stay still long enough to paint them. I also learned that they tend to swim in similar enough patterns that it's possible to watch them enough to paint them from life. Finally, I learned that when they stick their mouth out of the water they make a rather unpleasant sucking sound. It took a little while as I was painting to figure out what on earth was making those sounds, then I noticed one of the larger fish trying to suck the moss or algae from one of the near by rocks and realized he was the one making that noise. I didn't realize they could stick their whole mouth out of the water. It's a very odd sight.

 Koi © 

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.

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 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.

Second Breakfast - Daily Painting by George De Chiara

Second Breakfast

For the last few days I've been thinking about trying a painting of a cow field. I like the way the dark cows contrast against the golden ground cover we have here in Texas as our fall colors continue to turn.  I was determined to capture this scene today.  After an hour exploring the countryside, I finally came across a great little pasture full of cows with a safe place on the side of the road that I could paint from. Since this was the first time I tried to paint cows from life, I thought I it might be a good idea to work small so I could suggest the cows form while I studied them to learn their anatomy.  The next time I try this, I think I can go a little larger and get more detail and accuracy into the cows.

Second Breakfast

 
Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 3 inches x 5 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to go to auction.
Initialed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Daily Painting - Some Weather, Huh?

Some Weather, Huh?

 The weather here in Texas has been so brutally hot these last few weeks, I couldn't help but think of the beach. Today topped out to 115 degrees, according to my car's thermometer and I think this has been the 22nd out of 23 days that we've topped 100.  The breeziness of the coast would be very welcome now.  That reminded me of the awesome shorebird sanctuary close to the Texas A&M Corpus Christi campus my wife and I visited over our anniversary.  It was a hot, quiet place teeming with brown and white pelicans, egrets, and, more excitingly,Roseate spoonbills.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good reference photo of the spoonbills because they were just too far away.  These seagulls were much more bold and I think they knew they were safe there enjoying that hot day at the beach. There they were, just sitting in the water without a care in the world About half way through painting this I thought, these seagulls must occasionally say to each "Some weather we're having, huh?", which is were the title came from.

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.

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.

Daily Painting - Enjoying the Breeze

Enjoying The Breeze

 
I often wonder what the seagulls think about when they are standing on the beach. Is it, "Fish again, yuk..." or "Is that a hot dog floating in the water?" you just can't ever tell for sure. I think Pixar might have got it right in "Finding Nemo" when all the seagulls could say was "Mine!", I really think they think all of the food they see is theirs.

 This one sure was fun to paint. I tried a slightly different method with this one; I kept my paint thin for as long as possible. Slowly building up to opaque thinker paint. In fact there are a lot of areas when the paint never became opaque, like in the lights and mid tones on the seagulls body and in the foreground. I also tried to keep the darks transparent by thinning them out with a little mineral spirits. I really like this approach and want to explore it more this week.

 

Daily Painting - Afternoon Break

Afternoon Break

 While out collecting reference, I came across a group of brown pelicans sitting on top of some pylons. Most of them where sleeping with their heads resting on their backs.  I don't find that a very attractive way to paint them; they look like a  ball of feathers. There was this one guy just sitting on his pylon watching the world go by, or maybe he was just waiting for the boats to come back. It's so hard to tell, pelican expressions are subtle at best. Either way, I snapped a few photos of him. I had hoped the sun would come out before he flew off, but it never did. I kind of glad it didn't now because I had a lot fun painting the subtle light in the scene.  

 

Daily Painting - Fishing Derby

Fishing Derby

  Seagulls are constantly looking for food it seems like. No wonder why they are so hungry, all the searching is bound to work up an appetite! I photographed these guys over Memorial Day weekend in Corpus Christi. The beaches were very crowded and the seagulls spent most of there time flying overhead, occasionally diving into the gulf to snag a fish swimming too close the top of the water. They would only land when they needed a break or when they saw some food they could snap up. I remember being a little disappointed since I really wanted to get some good reference of seagulls on the beach for a few paintings I want to do. Looking back over my reference now I think have what I need.

Daily Painting - Catch Of The Day

Catch Of The Day

 
I called this one Catch Of The Day because these pelicans would sit in the water waiting for the fisherman on shore who was cleaning fish to throw his discards to them and they would catch it.It was a lot of fun to watch. I took a few photographs of the whole thing thinking it would make a good painting. This was painted from one of those photos.