New job and recent paintings

Oil on canvas, 3st 10x10x4 cm

This week has been full of new impressions and changes since I just started my new job this monday as an intern at an architecture office. I got to start one week early since they had so much to do there, and that worked out fine for me.

After we came home from Gotland I had been practicing some new techniques with my aquarelles that I brought, and I´m starting to like it more and more. But I can never really keep away from painting in oil for too long, so here are some new ones I´ve been painting on recently.

I added color on the three landscape pieces (above) last week and I´m really happy with the result in color! I did it over and over a few times to get the color I wanted. It turned out to be a mix of Paynes Grey, Yellow Ochre and Burnt Ochre, in various proportions. The sky is Payne´s Grey (my new favorite blue color!) and white, with the reddish under painting showing through.

Oil on canvas, 40x40 cm

Here is another recent one. I was experimenting with the light and the texture of the field. Colors used are Indigo, Payne´s Grey and Burnt Umber in the sky. And in the field: Indian Red, Burnt Umber and Indigo.

Trying to get back to drawing

Since last week I decided that it was time to start drawing again. I have been painting so much that I thought I shouldn't forget about drawing. And also because I really want to apply for an architecture scholarship that I found out about, where you have to send in pieces of your work (only black and white!).

Then hopefully I can do a field trip around Europe next summer with the purpouse of learning more about building houses in an enviromentally friendly way. That is something I unfortunately haven't paid much attention to in my three years in architecture school. And it's surprisingly not really a big matter in the education so you sort of have to specialize in that yourself. So I thought it was about time for me to put some focus on a really important topic like that.

I began drawing without a real purpose, to take some pressure away and get the process started. Did these sketches of my livingroom just for fun. And even though the apartment was kind of cluttered at the moment, it was fun because there were just more objects to draw! Makes it more interesting with all the details, like a random still life. And imagine a photograph of the same thing, that would not say anything at all, just that I have a messy apartment.


But I couldn't keep myself from painting for long, I found this really inspireing article about underpainting and the wipe-out method on the blog of Jennifer Phillips. And then I was boosted with creativity for the rest of the day to paint and wipe out rolling landscapes with only one "color". Just playing around with the shapes, compositions and especially the lights and darks, I was really enjoying myself. (Obviously influenced by Jennifers works.) Couldn't really get the best underpainting mixture so I ended up mixing all the "earth tones" on my palette to use them up. So now it kind of looks like I was painting in chocolate, but I like it. Will be interesting to see if I dare put some paint on top of this. Oh and also, I painted on this 3d-canvas for the first time so I made the landscape go around the edges too, in case you see it from the sides.

Three 10x10x4 cm - oil on canvas

Also I took out an old moleskin book full of my drawings from Portugal to inspire me to draw again. We went there first year of school in 2006. Our teachers gave us all a book and said as a joke that we had to fill them. But me and a friend were up for the challenge and really pushed ourselves to fill every page. And it looks really nice when you pull out the pages like an accordion and look at the drawings all together. Unfortunately I can't find this type of moleskin book anywhere, so I hope they didn't stop making it.



Going off to the island of Gotland now for a week, will hopefully come home with more drawings and photos of reference for painting!

Hibiscus experiment

Just a little hibiscus painting I made as an experiment with transfering an image with the grid method. Using the picture of a flower on my hibiscus tree. (It´s only 15x15 cm.) I did this picture in a few stages. Since I started out with a canvas that I had painted on before, it already had a darker background. And when painting the lines of the flower I did it with white paint to get the lights, so I kind of got a black and white underpainting. Then I put it away and let it dry for a month or so. Today I took it up again and started filling in the hues (Madder Lake Deep, Burnt Sienna) and the darks. Then I went into detail with the darks and lights, making it less flat and giving it more volume.

After that I painted over everything around the flower with a dark sepia paint and with the paint still wet I mixed in white and indigo to get some texture and light in the background as well. Now I hope this will dry in time for my grandmothers 80th birthday!

Here are some pictures of the process: