Amber Globes

This painting is at the 'got to live with it' stage. I'm nearly finished and I usually hang it on a wall and live with it for a few weeks before deciding if it is done. Sometimes there will be something nagging at me and if I live with it for a while, I can decide if its ready to be matted or if there is one more push left in the painting (I may add another layer on the background). But for now, Here's the (maybe) completed piece.

Amber Globes 3 (work in progress)

This afternoon I had the luxury of five hours of painting time and have been working on the glass facets. I believe you can now see the light pathway that hits the glass and bends through the facets. I've added the darker shapes toward the left and will put more layers of shadows in the globes themselves to create depth and translucency. I am pushing past the "ugly stage" all paintings take on and am looking forward to this in its completion. The painting is 20"x28" and on 260 lb. Arches Cold Pressed archival watercolor paper. The pigments are Daniel Smith and Winsor Newton brands.

Amber Globes 1 & 2 (W.I.P.)

When I was visiting Malakoff for a workshop this early spring, lovely woman named Norma hosted my stay there. Her home was on a beautiful lake and as she was a former antique dealer, she had a marvelous collection of antique glass pieces. I fell in love with these hand blown amber globes.


We spent an afternoon photographing them and I recently began this painting. It is really slow moving. I'm using new gamboge, permanent rose, winsor red and a bit of quin gold for the globes, greying down some of the reflections in the globes with a speck of winsor green.

The green glass is new gamboge and pthalo blue and Ultramarine Blue. The table top is multi layers beginning with my favorite grey mixture, Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna. It has wonderful granulating properties and the pigment separates. To this I added shots of undersea green, quin rose and a bit of the leftovers in the palette. In between I added layers of new gamboge and some of the orange mixtures I put together.

The facets in the glass are done one at a time. This patch took 3 hours using all the color listed previously with occasional hits of turquoise.

Darlin' Clementines

I painted this demo of clementines in a glass compote for a local art league in Mineola, Tx. I began with the clementines using new gamboge, quin gold and a bit of quin burnt orange. I "stippled" areas, skipping around and leaving a lot of light holes. I wanted this to be a first layer of texture on the skin of the citrus. also, the wedges of citrus was painted loosely, leaving areas of white to allude to veining.

I then began layering these colors with permanent alizarin, quin rose and tinted some of the warm mixtures with cool greens and blues to add depth. I actually painted three paintings in order to further the demo for the audience (you can tell because some of these clementines are darker than the next paintings). At some point I will actually finish the other two! A few orange reflections were added to the stem and base of the compote.

I began to add shadows in the white table runner, tinted the glass a turquoise and then mixed winsor green, ultramarine blue and permanent alizarin to make a warm brown for the table. The background was done by using various wet and dry mixutures of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna (my favorite grays) and adding undersea green, a wonderful granulating color. At first I didn't like the mottled look of the blooming that happened in the background.

But after letting it sit for a while, I began to really like the texture of the background. I improved it by adding another glazing of ultramarine blue and undersea green, using the granulating properties to my advantage. Lace holes are created by merely painting the holes; brown where the fabric rests on the table and blues/lavanders where the fabric folds back on itself.