I've finally moved the home studio into the loungeroom - no more painting in the cold! more space!
and a couch to sit back and analyse the latest mistakes !!

I still need to build a big wall easel and a better taboret, but it's a good start - really making it easier to finish the paintings for the show...

Here's a couple small still life pieces I did on brown onions and garlic last week, put em up on ebay & sold already, maybe I should do more...

'Onion and garlic'
20x20cm
Oil on Tasmanian oak panel

'Brown onion and garlic'
20x20cm
Oil on Tasmanian oak panel

Pretty creative titles hey! The timber surface (after being primed) was interesting to paint on - smooth surface allowed the brush to slide but the slightly apparent random grain texture also grabbed the paint.

I've finally gotten around to finishing this small horse portrait,

I had a lot of fun working on this one today, especially the sheen on the coat. It's a pity so much stuff kept getting in the way stopping me from getting around to working on it again as I'm quite happy with the way it turned out!

"Santina"
30x40cm, oils on linen

Finally finished the four small paintings of the first 7 Eleven store in Western Australia

The guys there commissioned these to give as gifts to some of the bosses of 7 Eleven when they visit next month, I hope the paintings go down as well as those Krispy Kreme donuts!

I've been spending a couple hours each night outside priming the aluminium panels. They're all double-primed with oil prime ready to go, all 350 of them, it took a while...

A new night scene on the big easel, finally !

This is just the underpainting really, blocking it in to get all the shapes in the right place, it's fun working a bit differently to the usual way I construct a painting.
(That's one of the little studies that I did a few weeks ago sitting above it on the easel for reference).

I pushed it a little more blue than in the study, but I think I've decided to push it back closer to the brown/pink/grey in the study (a bit hard to see colours properly in these little images on screen).

This is the second one in a body of work that's going in a joint exhibition with fellow oil painter Andy Kent,
We're aiming for somewhere around April for the show, but the decision on the date is way off at the moment - we just need to enjoy painting the pieces at this stage !

Trying out some of the new paints and one of the dry panels, not as slippery as I thought, actually it's quite absorbent probably because of the oil prime.

I've coated a couple more with a layer of red oxide and some medium, we'll see if that makes any difference once they're dry
First try with Michael Harding Prussian Blue (nice) and Old Holland Green Earth (nice), but wow - the Williamsburg Nickel Yellow is great !