This is the finished painting I did this last week of Croagh Patrick. It is not the usual view of the mountain. It is looking at it from the south west side, so view above is facing north west. If you drive the road, which heads south, you arrive at Mweelrea Mountain and then onwards into the Delphi Valley heading south towards Killary Fjord, the only fjord in Ireland. This is the boundary between Galway and Mayo counties. Mweelrea is the highest mountain in Connaught but Croagh Patrick is not far behind. The colours are very close to those on the day and I am not brightening them too much compared to reality. I have also been working on other different types of subject, to see what I can do to improve. I have started a painting of children playing in surf, see below. This is a larger than the above painting, 16 x 22 versus the above 12 x 16 inch work. All my paintings are on canvas and I am using the Artists grade paints from Windsor and Newton, so all should be very good quality and fade proof.
When I get this finished in the next week or two I will post the final work online here. Due to the slight difficulty in photographing I have cropped a little of the picture off in the above, so it is slightly larger in reality, especially at the bottom. In the meantime I will be working in other ideas alongside this one. If you want to see my continued progress, make sure to subscribe to the blog and get automatic updates, or call back often. I post approx. once a week now, when I have new work. I am getting faster at painting due to learning better techniques, hence there will be faster progress in my ability, and more paintings to see!! Hopefully! I have several works finsihed now and when I get enough, approximately 20 - 30, I will explore organising an exhibition of my work. That appears to be a way of showing my work on a wider scale here in Dublin.
Anyway that's it for now - hope some people will leave comments and feedback as it's a way for me to know if you think I am improving. Something I am trying very hard to do now.
This is the initial stage of my next painting, which I have just sketched out. I don't use pencil on the canvas as it is difficult to cover in paint and instead I draw out with charcoal before going over it in paint. Here I have drawn in a medium green, made from mixing viridian and cadmium yellow. I am blocking in the background darker areas for now with viridian mixed with raw umber. I will update during the week as I progress this painting.
