Kevin's Painting Blog

I looked all over the web and couldn’t find this info. For future reference sake, here are some standard metric canvas sizes found here in Japan. I believe it’s the same for Europe as well as I recently attempted to copy a Renoir and what do you know, the original was “exactly” F15 measurements! The more I am forced to deal with metric, the more I am liking it I must say!

Standard Canvas Sizes (unit=millimeters)

Here is a simple copper cup. Simple, except that it hat 500 tiny dents in it and it was a pain in the ass to paint.  I picked a blue background to contrast with the orange color of the cup.  The spoon handle and head deviate from each other at an angle, that gave me somewhat of a fit for a bit but just had to look at it more carefully.

Copper Cup & Spoon - F3 Oil on canvas

Bought a bunch of smaller canvases, would like to paint a bunch of smaller paintings that I can knock out in a short amount of time.  The goal is to paint more, nit-pick less.  Looking through my collection of fake flowers and stuff, came up with this:

Set-Up

Thought this would be a good contrast of yellow and purple.  After two hours, this is what I ended up with, I’m kind of pleased with how it turned out.

Sunflowers in Violet Vase - 22cm x 27.5cm oil on canvas

Things seemed a little lonely so went to the convenience store and bought my first pack of cigarettes ever.  Bottles in background were put in from memory.

If I were to do it again, I’d probably get rid of the apples because it doesn’t really fit the theme well.  That said, this is the first painting I’ve done in a long time so it felt good to get back into the groove.

"Henry McKenna" - 46 cm x 38 cm oil on canvas

Spent about 3 or 4 hours, this went in pretty quick.  It’s going to change a lot from this however. Will let it dry a few days and next chance I get, will continue:

Basic lay in...

Here’s my pallet, what a mess:

After a 2 years of losing my way (enough said), I have finally became motivated to pick up the brushes again. What really motivated me was seeing the Van Gogh exhibit in Tokyo a week and a half ago.  Despite the horrific crowds that surrounded each of the exhibited works, this exhibit had an unusually large amount of Van Gogh’s sketches, which I love.  So with that in mind, here is the first painting I’ve done in quite some time.

The theme is American Bourbon, which I have recently come to enjoy.  With an empty bottle given to me by a local bartender, I set up this still life:

Still life set-up

I wouldn’t waste real burboun in that glass, it’s oolong tea.

Next, did a rough sketch in charcoal.  It didn’t end up fitting the paper, but that’s what pre-drawings are for:

Charcoal pre-drawing

Next, laid it in on canvas using ultramarine blue.  I liked how specks of blue peeked through in the last dog painting I did and thought I’d give that a try again:

Under-painting in ultramarine blue

Still just barely fits. Will let that dry and hopefully hop on it very shortly.