Apply a sky

Been trawling though my photo archives looking for landscape references, I've found a few good photos that stand alone as a ref for a painting but many that worked in one way but not another. The Falkland Islands are a place that is dominated by the sky and in many of my photos that's the element that does not work. I photograph a particular scene that I like but so often the sky & clouds are uninteresting and this wrecks the feel of the image.

Recently I've taken to shooting images of 'good' skies with the object of using them to fix scenes, I have about 300 of these good sky images now, sunsets, sunrises, stormy, windy, broken cloud but all 'good' images. A suitable sky can be pasted onto a photo to jazz it up (I use Corel PhotoPaint for this but any decent photoeditor will do), Here's a few photos I've 'fixed' in this way, they don't stand up as a photo in themselves but it gives me a more inspiring reference for a painting (I hope).

This is a photograph taken by my mother of a scene looking south west from somewhere near the Black Hill in Chartres, I prefer to have more sky and I'm not entirely comfortable with the high contrast of the slab of rock in the foreground...so...here it is cropped and with a new, more dynamic sky applied:

Here's a couple more:

Hill Cove

Hill Cove, this wasn't bad at all but again I wanted just a bit more going on, the Sky overlay came from another photo taken on the same day but about an hour later:

Fox Bay

Fox Bay, this was taken from our car...as was the sky only about 5 minutes earlier but quite a difference:

Must crack on and see if I can get some decent paintings from these, I feel that this will prove to be a useful trick.

The Blue Hound

I've been brute forcing a commissioned portrait so thought I'd take a break and do something a bit more fun....and here he is, the blue hound. 
He was inspired by a dog I saw in the movie Gladiator. At the beginning when the Romans are fighting the Germans the Roman General Maximus has a large, Alsation type hound that tags along with him. He only appears for a few seconds but he's a nice looking dog, this is based on him.
soft pastels on 30 X 40cm cartridge paper.

Started with hard pastels:

...then soft pastels:

Finished:

This took a couple of hours. Must do more using this loose style, it's great fun.

Monty the cat

My first ever cat portrait! This was my wifes birthday present back in February (the painting that is, not the cat). He's six years old and he's a git (but we love him). Charcoal & pastels on 30 X 40cm yellow pastelmat.

ref photo:

Charcoal sketch:

Some colour added:

Nearly done:

Finished:

This was one of these paintings that just rolled out quite nicely, got it done in one afternoon, happy days!.

Bruce

This is a commission I had a few months ago, to start with I thought it was just another dog portrait but it turned out that the customer wanted other specific elements, foreground is a headshot of the Huntaway Bruce, fair enough but that had to be applied to a background of a location and a flock of sheep AND a shepherd (the owner of Bruce). This was something new as I'd never tried to combine elements like this before, in the end I had to omit the shepherd, it was just too much going on and I couldn't make it work. Here are the reference pics I had to work with:

Bruce

Sheep

Background (& shepherd on his quad bike)

Clearly this wasn't going to be just a portrait, it was a combination of portrait and landscape...and I don't much like doing landscapes, way too tricky. Anyway I messed around with a few compositions and in the end  the most obvious worked the best:

Composition sketch:

On the strength of this rather crude drawing I got the go ahead. I opted for charcoal and soft pastels (surprise surprise) on 30 X 40 cartridge paper.

Charcoal sketch, Bruce's head:

Completed sketch:

Some colour thrown in:

Finished:

I found this to be quite a challenge and was quite pleased with the result. The client was delighted with it when she got it and then threw another idea at me, something much, much tougher altogether, watch this space.....

Haven't been here for a while

Cor! Five months since I last posted, where does the time go?

Well for the last seven weeks I've had my arm in a sling after I managed to dislocate my shoulder (it had to be my right arm of course...doh!), happily it's healing well now and I've been (carefully) doing some drawing again. Here's a few pieces I'd got done before my injury:

First of all some commissions, there's a couple more but I'm going to post them individually:

Joey the lab, charcoal & pastels on 30 X 40 cartridge paper.

A set of two individual pastel portraits of a friends children, also one coloured pencil portrait of both together:

......and a couple I did as Christmas presents:

Tealeaf the lurcher, charcoal.

Ruby, my youngest niece, charcoal

Andi

Just got a load of fine new materials courtesy of my sweepstake win, new paper, card, fixative, all sorts, also 3 sets of Unison pastels, landscape 72, portrait 72 and starter 72 so my palette is now pretty decent.

One of the paper types is ingres sheets in a selection of colours, did this this afternoon on A2 black ingres, Portrait of the Singer & Songwriter Andi Neate:

Bump!

Still here, Had a bit of a dry spell but recently been working on some commissions and such. What's good is that I'm getting paid for them, what's bad is they're all gifts, so I can't show any of them yet.

Still all dry media of course, charcoal and pastels. Here's an idea I'm playing with: Boom the dog backlit on wet sand, just liked the look of the reflections:

ref photo

Sketch, Charcoal & pastel

Made the local paper!

Very gratifying that my picture was used in the article.
:)