Dog Star Football and Fringe Benefits - Further Progress (Part 2)

My entire paint set.

I have to admit, I find committing myself to painting again something of a struggle. I haven't done any additional work to either painting until today, a week after I started and wrote Part 1 to this series of blogs.

Why have I not worked on them until today you may ask? Well today I needed to write about my progress in this blog post so... I thought I'd better... you know... 'progress'.

It's not that Dog Star Football or Fringe Benefit are particularly hard paintings to create, well, Fringe Benefit is a bit harder than usual but not by much. If I just follow my process they'll turn out just fine.

It's just that I need to start painting pictures that have more meaning to me than my previous work has. Start really painting the things I want to paint and stop painting things that will result in a nice painting but doesn't really say more than that.

Anyhow, enough navel gazing. Here's where I'm at with the current artworks.

Dog Star Football

Dog Star Footbal - Main areas of colour finished.

Despite not working on this until today I was thinking about the overall colour scheme I would employ for both paintings throughout the week.

For Dog Star, having made the decision to add a background with a low horizon line (usually my backgrounds are just a gradient of one colour) I decided to make the top section look like sky and the bottom look like grass. In that way it would suggest the dog was on a field... perhaps even a football field.

Dog Star himself I decided to colour an off white, cream colour and, he will eventually have dark brown ears, suggesting that this dog could be the grown up version of Dog Star Puppy - mentioned in Part 1.

Fringe Benefit

Fringe Benefit - Background, skin tone and some hair done.

I have in mind a pinkish-purple colour scheme for this painting. It's subject, I suspect, will appeal more to a female viewer and I've noticed many of our local female artists like that range of colours in their own work. Well at least colours that range from dark blues and purples through red and then to pinks... not so much green.

At this stage I am a little concerned that my background didn't turn out quite so brightly as I had in mind. In fact it looks a little muddy so I imagine I may have to brighten it up at a later time. Once I see how the rest of the image is panning out.

Both artworks will need to have progress much further by my next post. Hopefully I can discipline myself to do some more work through the week than I did this time. Until then watch me work in the video below as I progress these paintings to the point you've seen in the above photos. I also give some brief information about the paints I use.