Johnny's ocean painting

Hello,


Well, Joel and Victoria loved their painting. It's awesome when I pull it off, you just never know what somebody is going to like or dislike. As an artist, you have to go with the flow and give the people that hire you the final word, after all, it is their painting.


So, here we go again. A friend of mine was looking at my website and noticed a painting he really liked. He came over and we started talking about the painting he saw, he was talking about a little painting I did a few months a go. I ended up with this little painting from a gargage sale. It had this awful painting on it, so I sanded it down and did a whole new painting on top of it. The painting I did was a black and white ocean in the middle of night with a moon and stars. The painting was really small, so Johnny asked if I could do another one but this time make it 4ft long and close to 3ft tall. It's a cool painting, it's kind of like you're floating in the ocean and you can see the moon and stars above you.


After priming the canvas, I stopped and thought, I sure would like to have some motion in the water. Hmmm, I wander how I can create that some movement, after thinking about it I remembered that I had some dry paint in a tray. I'm bad about using a roller tray for a paint board, so there was a bunch of diffferent color paint in a tray that was all dry. I filled it up with water and let it set for a few days. After the paint sets in the water for so long it starts to seperate from the tray. So, I had this huge sheet of dry paint here's a pic

What I did was cut the sheet into little strips of paint like this

Then I glued the pieces on to the canvas, I didn't want to see the straight lines where I cut the paint with the siccors, so I used a special concocktion I came up with to cover over those lines. This is what it looks like

After all the texture dried I started painting the water a black color mixed with a cery dark blue color. Plus, I wanted to create a one of a kind night color, I mixed a metalic blue and some flat black, this gives the night color this special kind of shine that black alone can't give you.

                                                                      
I continued to add the black and dark blue color to the water trying to leave the areas where I'm going to add the white color (reflextion from the moon), alone.

Added the texture below the water really turned this painting into a piece of art, instead of it just being a flat looking painting. When you look at the lower left corner of the painting where the reflextion stops, it looks like the water is still moving. Like this

                                                                       
Now, the moon is a whole another story, and, you only have so many chances to get it right or you have to start all over because the paint builds up all around the circle of the moon and it looks fake at that point. Let me tell you, there's nothing easy about creating a moon, believe me, its not that easy. It's always hard when try to paint something the good lord created lol. So here's the finished painting, I'll put a better pic it on here next week.

                                       
Thanks for hiring to do this painting for you Johhny, I hope you like it as much as I do.
                                                                         

Joel and Victoria's painting

So hear we go again, the last painting was a lot of fun, but it's time to move on to the next one.

Some friends from work, Joel & Victoria, bought a house recently and started fixing it up. It sounds like a really cool house. They wanted a new painting for their new house and they came to the right person lol. After talking to Joel, I could tell he really liked some of my stained glass paintings. I call it that style because everybody said they look like stained glass windows. I love to paint these kinds of paintings because I have so much freedom to be creative, I can mix all kinds of different colors together, with all kinds of different shapes, it's just a lot of fun . On this painting I had a hard time coming up with the right drawing. I did probable 12 to 14 drawings trying to find the one I wanted to use for the painting. When Joel came over to discuss the painting, I showed him some of the other stained glass paintings I've done and he really liked the painting I did for the Ackley family. Their painting had a big A in the painting and Joel said “I like that, maybe we could put an I in my painting because my daughters name starts with an I. After thinking about their painting for awhile and doing some drawings, I asked Joel if we could put a big C for their last name instead of a I for her daughters name ( I wanted the painting to be a family painting instead of it being mostly about their daughter), he said sure. But, he said "can we put a letter for each member of the family, say, in each corner of the painting? So, I needed to put a big C somewhere close to the middle for their last name, and, J, V, I, T in each of the corners. That's another reason it took me so long to come up with the right drawing. I didn't want to put the C right in the middle where it sticks out like a sore thumb or punch's you right in the face when you look at the painting. I wanted it to be in there, but you couldn't really see it unless you were really looking. Plus, it looked kind of cheesy with the C right in the middle, like some bad tattoo or something. It's hard to explain, but I wanted the painting to have some class and eloquence. So, after finally coming up with the right drawing I went to work. After working on it for a couple of nights, I could tell it was, what I call, getting too busy. There was way too much stuff going on. I had to go back and take a bunch of stuff out by sanding certain parts out and using a bunch of white to wash out certain parts of it. Another problem was, the letters in the corners, I wanted them to look just right, but not have that stenciled look or something that was created on a computer. Plus I wanted them to have my famous swirl pattern on them too. So it took me awhile to come up with each letter. You know I had to think about this painting, remember, this is a family painting, and, will probable be passed down over generations, so I have to really pay attention to the details. Anyway, so here are some pics of some other 'Stained Glass' paintings I've done and the pics of the new painting at the end. Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, I hope you enjoy it.

Well, I got a lot more work done last night while my boys were enjoying the new pool lol. I've already talked about what I call 'ragging' which means applying the paint with a rag instead of a brush. After I get everything done to a certain point with a paint brush, that's when I start ragging. The ragging lets me create a feel, a warmth that a brush just can't do. It gives the shape depth and creates a whole new feeling to each color block. If you notice from pic to pic, I'm constantly changing the colors of each block, don't know how to explain this because it's just something I see or don't see. In my brain there has to be a certain combination of colors that are pleasing to my eye (And hopefully to other peoples too) and the only way is to keep changing the colors until I see what I want to see out of the painting. I can tell you this, this has not been an easy painting, but this is my 6th or 7th painting I've done in this style, so I know a lot of short cuts and secrets now. I use to always want to make the painting pretty the whole time I was doing one, by constantly redoing the black, but all that does is waste a bunch of black. This style of painting is like a bunch of my other styles, meaning, they don't look good until the very end. I'll frame the painting tonight, which should be fun, NOT, making a frame this size is pretty much a pain in the ass, to be quite frank. Plus, I want to make this frame like the Torq Lite painting frame, where the sides are 2" wide. I have a feeling I'll be working tell 2 or 3 in the morning tonight to get everything just about done. Here's a pic showing what I got done last night. We'll see what it looks like after the weekend. Talking about the weekend, I hope everyone has a good one. Seeya Monday, late Clint 

Hello, I got 98% of the painting done over the weekend, I just have to do a few touch ups and it'll be 100% finished. I told Joel I have it finished by tomorrow so I worked on it pretty much all Sunday. It was so hot yesterday; I had no interest in going outside anyway lol. I had a hard time with the letters in the corner, just couldn't get them right, but eventually I got it. This is the second time this blog has really helped me, Joel was looking at the pics and wanted to make sure I added a lot more grays and blues. I had a few too many greens and browns for him, so I'm really glad I got his feed back. I think painting came out great, I took a bunch of pics through out the weekend with my good camera but for some dumb reason I got a pic of the finished painting on my cell, so it's not that great. I put that pic at the very end; I had to doctor it up a bit. I'll take a bunch of good pics tonight and load them on here tomorrow. I also remembered over the weekend that I did show my best work in this style, I did a 63ft long painting at a restaurant last year in this style and made a video of it, so I'm loading that on here too.

Well, at one point last night, I thought there is no way I’m going to have this painting done by tomorrow morning. I was having a hard time painting the sides of the frame, the front of the painting has a black outline holding everything together, but the sides are a dark gray color. I didn’t want to tape it off and have it in exact line dividing the gray and black color; I wanted to do by hand so it has a few flaws in it. One thing about me, I hate perfect computer generated looking stuff. Plus, I had to do the ( I ) in the lower right corner all over again, the ( I ) was too big and didn’t look right. This was kind of an interesting painting; in that, Victoria wanted browns, greens and red colors and Joel wanted gray and blue colors, so finding the right combo of colors was interesting to say the least. In the end, I think I gave both of them what they were looking for. I got to say, I didn’t think this painting was going to take this long, I figured I had done a bunch of paintings in this style, so it wouldn’t take me long, but it took a little longer than I thought. I think it came out really beautiful, I’m really happy with the color combination. I can only imagine how beautiful it’ll be in their new house. Here’s the pics to show the finished painting. I want to thank Joel and Victoria for hiring me to do this painting for them. I hope it gets passed down to their daughter and so on and so on and always stays in the family. I’m going to take a few days off before I start the next one; a friend wants me to do a painting for him. We’ll go over it on the next blog. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Clint B. Meadors

C Meadors Art

Clint.meadors@yahoo.com