Urban Landscape Trio B Squared Wine Bar

The trio of  Cityscapes are complete.   They might need a little more positioning, but for now...at least they are up.

My wonderful wife Lecia and buddy Zach helped position the paintings

I hung the final of the three Urban Landscapes I did for the B2 Wine bar in the Pearl. 
This little gem in the Pearl District just opened this month.  My  wonderful wife Lecia and  my good friend  and golf guru Zach Welch gave me a hand in the positioning.  Now I just have to move the lighting a little more to center.  I have one more to do for the wine bar, but according to Zach, there has been interest shown in the center painting already, so with a little luck I could be doing even more. 
The coffee shop B2 Coffee Haus, which is located a few doors up in the same building features 8 of my watercolor paintings as well.  I'm not going to lie about this.  When I went in to hang this third painting, I was stilll very pleased with how the other small painting came out.  Usually there will be something that I want to change about a painting, but this one still suited my eye.
Of course you can always get better, and I will.  However it is necessary to be satisfied with a result.  That's what keeps me going.  That and being able to see my work somewhere other than in my painting space.
  I have been wanting to paint  more, but time hasn't allowed it lately.  This makes for some frustrating days.  Hopefully this will change soon. When faced with such a small amount of time and so many choices of what to do,  the brain will often choose to do nothing.  That's the battle I'm facing now.  I have so many ideas, but I know I don't have time to do even one full painting, so I end up not even getting started on one.

Cityscape: New Lessons learned

As I read through the original post about this painting I realized how my opinion had changed.  So I decided to update what I think about this painting. 
It is interesting to see how my opinion can change about my own work even though I have left it alone.  This painting grew on me more and more as the weeks went by.  I began to look at all the positive things rather than where I had struggled with it.  So when I look at it today, I am satisfied and comfortable with it.  There will always be things that you feel you could have done better, but at the end of the day, if you achieve the visual result you wanted, you have suceeded.

Busy Saturday

I'm pretty tired, but I felt the need to post this paintng.  This is the larger painting I've been working on. Seeing it online seems to help me decide where I need to make corrections.  I ran out of natural light to photograph this so it didn;t come out very clear.  I was careful to prepare the lines in this one, yet I still struggled to make it work.  Finally after piddling around with it I decided to go bold and try whatever happened to fall on the canvas.  That;s when I made the most progress.  Sometimes being too deliberate handcuffs me. I will try to get a better photo tomorrow.  

Early Saturday.

Early Saturday on 6th   12X16" Acrylic on Canvas

 I started this one Saturday morning.  I chose the smaller canvas thinking that I first needed to establish a rhythm of painting.  Initially  I couldn't picture in my head how the painting would work, but I kept going.  I added layers to the foreground, established some lines and kept adding layers.   Eventually I was able to work thru the problems and it emerged quite nicely.   I'm learning that you can't paint as freely with Acrylic as you can with watercolor, unless you don't mind wasting a bunch of paint.  I usually mix colors on the fly, but I don't expect them to dry out in 10 minutes.  I know there are ways to make them last longer, and I'll have to look into doing that.  I do like that you can layer them as well as make them opaque.  Well, its on to the next canvas.  I need to do a larger painting.  This one's 12X16"

Downtown Early Morning...So Far

This is the Acrylic Painting I've been working on.  I've got some tidying up to do here, but the main portion is done.  This is a rare case where the original actually look better than the photo.  It's very difficult to capture the dark colors with a camera.  I was thinking about making the headlights in the background more prominent, but this seems to be working as well.  I'll have to sit on it.  Im moving on to the next scene.  A larger painting that might test my resolve to ge this project done. 
  One thing I have discovered again about Acrylic paint.  It dries faster on the pallette than you can paint most of the  time.  This makes me think harder about moving to oils.