Thunderstorm coming

This painting relies very much on the presentation of the thunderstorm cloud. This could be done nicely in oil or acrylics, but at the moment i am interested in pastel painting and tried to capture the mood of the coming thunderstorm in this work. The landscape is around Munich and I personally experienced this thunderstorm during a bike ride. To remember the scene, I took a photo with my smart phone camera and altered the scene to give a nice composition.

Pastel paintings

After many month of watercolor painting, I thought I had to do something different. Changing the medium gives you a fresh momentum and gets you out of your routine. You have to learn a lot about the new technique. It starts by selecting the right paper and also important the color of the paper for creating harmony or contrast. The paintings shown above are done on Canson tinted paper. The pastels I used are Pan pastel, Jaxon Soft pastels and Van Gogh semi soft pastels for making lines and smaller marks. The advantage of this technique, you do not need any brushes and take care of drying time for color and brushes. You can stop painting any time and resume as often as you like. The only thing you have to do is wash your hands. The disadvantage of this technique to my opinion is the dust you produce by applying the color to the paper. You have to protect the ground, since a lot of pigment follows gravity and collects on the ground. Since the dust is very fine there is also a danger to breath it in. Pastel painters sometimes use a mask for protection and gloves for blending. But the colors are very bright and the method is like drawing. If something is not as you like, you can easily change things later.

Shanghai

This is a picture of Shanghai and I found the contrast of the modern glass buildings and the old chinese wooden building fascinating. It realy shows how China is entering the modern world and there symbols. Since there were so many details to paint i did this painting on a full sheet of watercolor paper from Fabriano. There were no big washes to do mainly detail work, so 300 gr paper was good enough.

Lucca Streetscene

This is another painting done from the sketches I did during our last stay in Lucca Toscana. The sun was very bright and cast sharp shadows on the walls in the narrow streets. The brightest spot in this painting is the direct sunlight on the street and the building on the left side. This difference between the bright sunlight and the dark shadows is the mood I tried to capture in this painting. It was done on Hahnemühle 600 gr rough paper in the size of 38x56cm.

Lucca backyard

This year we went to Lucca Italy once more and I wanted to make several sketches in the beautiful old medival town. We rented an apartment directly in the pedestrian area of the city near piazza bernadini. The weather in the beginning was quite rainy, so I made a sketch out of the living room window looking at the small piazza. From my memory and the drawing from my sketchbook I produced the above painting pretending it was a sunny cloudless day. The painting was done on Arches 300gr rough paper in the size of 36x48cm. Shown is also the drawing from my sketchbook.

Paintings of this week

It seems a good average to do two paintings a week for me. I started with an idea I got from one of my last paintings of a church and wanted to do that in a more abstract form. I started by wetting the paper and pouring and dropping differnt colours on the paper. When this was dry, the two church shapes were cut from adhesive film and „Moor Lauge“ was poured around those covered shapes. After this was dry again all the details were added.
The second painting is an impression of a market place in Antalya Turkey.

Rainy day

I am now recovering from the ablation of the retina in my left eye. Its getting better every day and the interest in painting is coming back more and more. This is a street scene I have done before, but the colors I used before did not satisfy me anymore. So I tried this scene of a rainy day in the city again  with more light and shadows cast by the wet streets. The painting was done on Hahnemühle 600 gr rough paper in the size of 56x38cm.