Sunday, August 31, 2014

Kinmen Pond and Sky

This is for Virtual Paintout August 2014 challenge. It's oil on 10x12 canvas panel.

This is the last day of the challenge, but there was one scene I really wanted to paint. (Ref) I wanted to capture the cloud and sky and their reflections, the bright green patches of vegetation, and brownish orange of algae floating on the pond. So I kicked up all the color and contrast to make more dramatic. I did this one relatively quickly, in about three hours.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Bridal Seat in Kinmen

This is for Virtual Paintout August 2014, Kinmen Taiwan challenge. It's oil on 10x12 canvas board.

Kinmen has a lot of interesting scenes with traditional Taiwanese houses. I was browsing inside the Shanhou Folk Cultural village. There were many interesting views with Taiwanese curved roof and traditional houses. In one of the rooms there was this bridal chair with beautiful silk curtains (Ref). I decided to give this a try because I wanted to paint the silk curtains and also the interesting carved panel windows behind it. With the curtains I was trying to capture the reflective sheen of the material. The panel windows actually took me much longer to paint just because it was such a painstaking task, and I also wanted to give the painting a little more depth through the lights shining in from the outside through these windows.