Lac Philippe Fall

Excited to start a new session today for the Oil painting foundation class. This time the project is landscape and autumn is already around the corner! So here is a landscape of Lac Philippe with fall colors that I am going to teach...

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Lac Philippe Fall - 9x12 inches, oil on canvas panel

A walk around Lake Mission Viejo

I am going to enter this painting in "Paint the Lake" contest held in the city of Mission Viejo. The idea here is to go and do plein air painting on the lake. Or one can take pictures of the lake and develop a landscape in the studio. In this Landscape painting, I wanted to tell my story about experiences walking around the lake. So here it is a very non-traditional kind of Landscape: (do let me know your comments)

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A walk around Lake Mission Viejo - 16x20 inches, Oil on Canvas Panel

 My story here is that for taking pictures, I walked all around the lake which is around 3 miles. There is a wonderful walkway below (Alicia Parkway). There are these shells embedded all along the walkway which attracted me. Lot of activities happen in the lake - fishing is a very big one and that day we actually saw a boy getting quite a big catch @ 6AM. In that morning hour, there was even sail boat and canoe etc. There are wonderful houses surrounding the lake on both sides. One other great feature of this lake was the beach, which I tried to highlight as if seen through a magnifying glass. On a typical holiday afternoon there are lots of people picnicing in the beach area and it is sooo fun to watch all these activities going around the lake. I wish I had an year round pass to this lake, so that I could also join these people!

Feeling Pink - Work in Progress

I made this a separate blogpost, just because I want to celebrate this progress in my painting journey!
This is the first time I have painted without critically sketching with pencil on the canvas. It feels like I have been able to express myself freely, fully and easily!
So here I am posting how I progressed through the different stages in painting this beautiful waterlily:
Final Painting:

Below is Stage 1. Stage 1 is just the first impression and marking the light and dark shapes in the flower.



 Stage 2: In Stage 2, I actually put in the shapes of the petals, specially the inside petals. I forgot to take a picture just when I stopped painting Stage 2. So below is the result of progressing a bit more into Stage 3 - specially the center part of the flower.

Stage 3: Don't have a picture of Stage 3 either. But stage 3 is about creating more variations in each of petal shapes and the background.

Stage 4: This is the completed painting with final touches and highlights.

The inspirational photograph is below. Thanks to Wetcanvas community for posting these wonderful pictures and hosting monthly challenges.