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Rodeo Plaza - Original Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Rodeo Plaza

This weekend I was invited to go paint at the Fort Worth Stockyards with a group of painters. We had beautiful weather to paint in on Saturday morning. After considering several interesting sites, I chose to paint this view of Fincher's Western Store because I was so drawn to the shadows against the white building and the clear blue sky. The view reminded me of something Edward Hopper (Early Sunday Morning) might paint and after spending the day painting it, I can better appreciate why he chose his subjects for a painting. For me, scenes like this are all about the abstract patterns, like the way the chimney on the roof creates a nice break in the big blue (sky) shape behind it. I am also attracted to the way the windows and shadows create interesting shapes in the big white space of the building's wall. These shapes are really what I was thinking about when I painted this. 

Here's what my painting looked like when I brought it home from a day of painting:

 Once I was done with my painting, I took it home and spent the rest of the weekend making mental notes of little things I wanted to fix before I considered this painting finished. I wanted to fix some of the colors in the white building side. It's hard to tell from this photograph, but some of the red from the windows got caught up in my brush and into the light color paint. I also wanted to fix the signs up a bit, as they were one of the last things I added, and I really just put in a few little color notes on them. I also thought about painting in a light pole to the scene to help break up the picture a bit more with an added vertical shape. It also helps that the stockyards have pretty neat looking light poles. Uncertain if I wanted to add this or not, I took an image of my painting into Photoshop along with an image of one of the light poles and experimented with different placements until I was happy with it.

Here's what it looked like in Photoshop. I wasn't that concerned with getting the light pole perfectly integrated into the photograph. I really just want to make sure I'd be happy with the placement. I tried it in a few different places, but this is the one I felt worked the best. It does a nice job of breaking up that large white area of the building and tends to pull the eye up towards the windows and cast shadows of the roof, which is where I want my center of interest.

Rodeo Plaza ©

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.

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.

Tin Roofs - An Original Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Tin Roofs

  I'm always gathering reference images of scenes I might one day be interested in painting. Often years can go by without thinking about them. Then one day, I'll get the itch to paint something particular and rifle through my reference images until I find the "one". I can't recall the exact location of this scene any longer, but it's somewhere along the Illinois/Wisconsin border. I must have hundreds of these types of images from when I lived in the Midwest. I took the reference image for this painting at least 25 years ago. There's a date stamped on the back on the image (remember when they use to do when they developed them?), but it's mostly worn off. The only part I can read is it's from September, which seems rather appropriate, though that's not the reason I choose this image. I just loved how these building were sitting down in this little valley. The sun made such a strong pattern of light and dark on them, but what really attracted me to this scene was the background landscape. The patterns of the fields and trees were just too much to resist.

Tin Roofs ©

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

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

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.

Some thoughts on setting up a still life by George De Chiara

 Sometimes I think the most challenging part of painting a still life is setting it up. There are so many decisions one has to make, such as what objects to use, how many, and where to place them, just to name a few. When I first starting painting still lifes, I was lost about how to set one up. Through trial and error, I have learned a few things since then, although I'm a long way from mastering the set up.  Undoubtedly, that mastery only comes after many years of practice.

In the beginning, my first few attempts at setting up my still life arrangements where all pretty much the same. I'd take a few objects and just sort of arrange them in some very basic way. I paid attention to some simple compositional rules, like not having anything dead center, avoid tangents, and try to have the shapes overlap a little, but all of those early paintings seemed to fall flat. They didn't grab my eye or lead it around the painting in any way. I needed to come up with some way to have a... well, theme, for a lack of a better word. The theme idea allowed me to have a context to arrange my thoughts. Now, I realize this may seem obvious, but it actually took me a while to realize this. Almost all of my previous experience with arranging still lifes was in very academic manner. Think dark background, wine glasses or a candle in a wine bottle, or a pile of grapes, so this is what I was recreating for the most part.  Thankfully, I never used the candle in a bottle. Once I started thinking in the terms of my theme, I noticed it got a little easier.

 Now you may be thinking the theme is something like music or your daughters first years memories, but this is not really what I mean by theme. To me, the theme is more of an abstract thought. For instance, one of my favorite theme ideas is "white water rapids," while another is "hay bales". Now, I'm not literally trying to paint these things in my still life; rather, I use these themes to help me arrange the objects in my still life. Somehow by thinking in these real world terms, I find it easier to come up with interesting compositions. Maybe it's the years I've spent painting landscapes before introducing still life paintings to my repertoire. Either way, it's almost become second nature to me now. The other thing I always try to work into my set ups is the appearance that there is more to the still life than what is painted, like if you could expand the canvas there would be something there.

For this blog, I photographed the progression of setting up a still life. Hopefully, this is interesting to a few of you.

For this still life, my "theme" was waterfalls. This means that I need to have lots of vertical size changes, like the rocks hidden within a waterfall. I also wanted to creat the feeling of depth or that misty atmosphere you sometimes see with very large waterfalls. For this reason, the first thing I did was set up lots of thin layers of material scraps, printed paper and ribbons.

Most of this will get covered up as I add more objects to my still life. Once I start to develop this more, I'll move and re-arrange these objects a bit, but for now this should be good enough to get me started.

My aim now is to build up different layers of height and vertical shapes. In my theme idea, the books represent the rocks at the bottom of a water wall, while the ribbons are the flow of the water. This also make it very easy for me to pick out which objects to use because I need something that gives me that variety in height. I do tend to grab the newer objects that I've acquired before relying on the old stand bys. In this case, my new stuff is that old wooden box and thin blue bottle. It's at this point that I start using my view finder to help guide where I'm placing these objects.

Now it's time to start adding the meat of the arrangement, so to speak. The fruit will most likely be the most interesting things to look at in the finished painting, which I consider the splash of this symbolic waterfall. I usually start this part of the process by first just getting the fruit into the still life about where I want it. Then, looking through my view finder again, I'll start to adjust the position and arrangement of the fruit. Notice how in the next image I have moved the fruit in ways both obvious and subtle.

This is the final arrangement that I'll paint. I've removed the book on the far left since it just sort of felt like it was barely leaning into the painting. I also felt this helped stop the eye from leaving the painting, since the larger dark green book acts like a stop and there's not much on the other side of it to attract the eye toward the edge of the canvas. I added the jewelry in the foreground lower left corner to help fill in this area, while still leaving a lot of open space. The open space invites the eye into the painting and once in, the jewelry and ribbons help lead the eye towards the focal area, the fruit and plate. I echoed the jewelery in a few other places as well, like on the wooden box and right behind the red piece of cloth. These should, hopefully, be nice little discoveries for the eye as it looks around the painting and hopefully continue to re-direct the viewer's eye back toward the center of interest. I also added a few other round shapes, like the watch and white coaster behind the apples, to help repeat the shape of the plate. The last change I made might be hard to notice just by viewing the images, but I rotated the apple right behind the plate so the darker red side of it on the shadow side. Why? Well, for me this is an easier way to paint it. I've found that if I try to have the darker colored side on the light side of the object it's usually a struggle for me to get it to read correctly. This seems to just lend it's self better to the lighting in the arrangement. I missed doing this same thing to the peach right next to it, but that's fine. I don't seem to have this issue with other types of fruit, just apples for some reason.

Well, that's it. This is basically how I come up with the arrangements for my still life paintings. I try to take my time and study the arrangement before diving in and painting it. On this set up, I spent about 2 hours arranging everything and making all the little tweaks I wanted to. I spent a lot of time studying it though my view finder to make sure I'm happy with where everything is. My view finder is divided into halves, creating four quadrants of equal size. I usually try to have an interesting arrangement of shapes in each quadrant of the view finder and to have some of the shapes overlap the quadrants next to it.  The only thing left to do now is paint it. That will be the next blog post, so be sure to check back!