Maverick Is Signed!

"Maverick" 2010 C.S. Miller 24x18" oil on gallery wrapped canvas

Gave Him A Glow

Maverick's color has been bothering me for a while, so I took the painting into different rooms in the house to look at it in different lights. The final decision was to warm up my palette and make him glow. I got out my new #12 Flat Silver Brush (love it!) and ditched the fear that comes with painting over what I had liked. The result is a warmer, more proportional dog and a background with sunlight peaking through the trees overhead. I like the combination of big brush and painting knife effects and am giving myself 2 days to finish him. It was commissioned as a Christmas present, so has to be dry enough for retouch varnish, painting the sides and wiring to hang. Then, I can think about Christmas.

Background Fun

Decided to work on the background yesterday. It involved putting in some bright blues and peaches and then coming over it and scraping darker, grayer greens, then coming over it again and scraping with yellow greens. The last layer was a darker, more olive green glaze.

Maverick's Color Transformation

Sweet Maverick looked just fine to me when I'd finished painting on Monday night, but there's a trick that too much exposure to bright light does to your eyes and your color perception which I only noticed the next afternoon. Maverick was purple! Yes, there are definitely shades of purple in his fur, in shadow, but I had taken it too far and didn't bring in the lights within the shadows which would have shown the warmer tones which make up his fur. So, Mr. Maverick got warmer yesterday and I had to leave the background for next week, as I'm pretty sure that I should be attending to house stuff and packing for my trip to Mom's frigid temperatures tomorrow. I really wish that I'd bought the knee length down puffer coat when it was on the sales rack at J. Crew last year. But, just like Texas in the summertime, when you just move from air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned buildings to survive the heat, I imagine that I'll be quite toasty most of the time going from heated house to heated car to heated buildings. And I won't go out and shovel her driveway for fun this year! Or maybe I will!

"Maverick" Just Keeps Rolling Along

I was dragging yesterday afternoon, after my podiatrist appointment where he squeezed and prodded my foot to figure out where the problem was and also to back up his theory that it's a neuroma, so I wasn't chomping at the bit to get up to the studio and paint. Some days are like that but, fortunately, I know that once I get the lid off the paints and start mixing colors I will be totally immersed until Riley rouses me for some dinner. She's a good doggy that way. I'd been having issues with the flatness of the painting and knew that it probably was a matter of working on the background first to get the values better, more accurate for the lighting. The flatness was a style of painting that I didn't think would go well in the home it was going to. I tried using my painting knife on the grass, but didn't like the effect, so went back to the paintbrush. It's been a bit since I've done an entire painting with brushes, but it looks like this one is it. Funny thing about brushes and their effect on canvas, I realized that I was having one hellova time photographing this painting today because the light kept bouncing off the brushstrokes. I don't have that problem half as much when I use painting knives. So, I worked on the background and made some adjustments to Maverick's stance, then reworked nearly all of his fur so that the values were good and he wasn't so splotchy...no matter how cool the colors were. I'm at an in-between stage where everything is cooking but it needs some spice, a little "Bam!" to kick it up a notch. I imagine that there will be additional colors brought into the background so that it's not a sea of greens. But not so much as it competes with Maverick for attention.

Signed It!

"360 Bridge II" copyright 2010 CS Miller 36x48" oil on gallery wrapped canvas.