Laguna
This might be a color study only or maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow. The light in Laguna and the water colors are different from San Diego, so I wanted to focus on capturing the changing light effects in a series of quick studies.
North Park San Diego- for sale
Palm trees, power lines, and bougainvillea in beautiful North Park, San Diego.
Speaking of North Park, next Saturday May 18, I’ll be at North Park Festival of Arts, in the juried artists area.
North Park Festival of Arts
Booth J-24
On University Ave near Iowa St.
11-6.
Hope to see you there!
Victorian cottage painting For Sale
This Victorian cottage is across the street from where one of my drawing groups meets, in the East Village of San Diego. Before it was restored, it was a wreck, but it is beautiful now.
The before:
Like so many things, it just needed a little work.
Concha pastry – buy now
I love these things.
Why does the concha appear to be floating? I propped it up in the back so I could see more of the top.
Chair in the Alley – buy now
Sunlight and shadows in a Hillcrest alley, San Diego, California.
East Beach Sunset – for sale
A blazing sky over East Beach in Santa Barbara, California.
Mission Trails Park For Sale
Painted on location one sunny afternoon in Mission Trails. I want to say it was late January, so the live oaks were green but the – I think they are Aspens, but maybe that’s not right- were golden.
East Beach- sold, but here are some others
I love East Beach.
Mission Bay – buy now
The place where Mission Bay flows into the Pacific Ocean, in Mission Beach.
Alley & Phone Wires – for sale
Morning light in an alley in Hillcrest. This painting started life as a plein air drawing.
Here are some announcements too. I have a booth at the Art Walk in Little Italy this Saturday and Sunday. My studio is completely full of frames and paintings waiting to be framed in them. If you’d like to stop by, I’d love to see you!
Saturday & Sunday, April 27 & 28, 2013
Mission Federal Art Walk, Little Italy, San Diego
Booth 784, on Fir Street between Columbia and India streets.
Capo Beach Painting
For the Orange County folks, another event this weekend. I’ve got 2 paintings including “Capo Beach” in the Less Is More show of plein air paintings at Randy Higbee Gallery, Costa Mesa, CA. Opening reception is Saturday April 27th 4:00 – 8:00 p.m. and the show runs April 27- May 10. This should be a great show.
Happy Thursday!
Crest Cafe, Hillcrest- buy now
A cool grey morning with the marine layer overhead so I went with black and white for this drawing of the famed Crest Cafe in Hillcrest, San Diego. Drawn from life from the patio where I was eating breakfast across the street.
Visited not one but two storage units today to get stuff for Mission Federal Art Walk next weekend. Both booths have resident bears to guard our treasures.
Booth 784, on Fir Street between Columbia and India streets.
Saturday & Sunday April 27 & 28th, Little Italy, San Diego. Maybe we’ll see you there! Bears are optional.
https://www.themovingcastle.com/?page_id=3946 .
Car repairs and palm trees- buy now
Painted from a drawing on the tables outside Lestat’s on Park coffee shop in University Heights.
East Beach- for sale
Painted “en plein air” or outside on the beach in Santa Barbara, California. I love this beach with its sailboats moored just offshore.
East Beach – buy now
Painted on location on East Beach in beautiful Santa Barbara.
Someone asked why I mostly have paintings of East Beach. Well, the answer is we usually stay across the street at the Motel 6, which as I understand it once cost $6 per night.
The thing is, when you are a painter and you are traveling, you really HAVE TO GO PAINT or you will go insane but you don’t want to wreck everyone else’s vacation. I try to compromise.
So a typical Santa Barbara painting day is, I get up just before dawn and try to be on the beach as the sun is coming up, and then I have a solid five hours to paint before we move on to lunch or wine tasting in the Santa Ynez Valley. So I mostly, but not always, just walk across the street to East Beach.
And I could probably paint on this beautiful beach every single day.
Boats Plein Air- buy now
A nice sunny day at Shelter Island in Point Loma.
A while back someone asked me to post in-progress shots. I mostly do that on my Facebook page (KevinInmanArt on Facebook) because it goes straight from my phone, but here goes. This painting is from Shelter Island in San Diego.
Nothing special about my approach here. It’s a typical alla prima painting starting from the white. I don’t always work this way. I like to experiment.
One rule I was taught in art school was, “never draw with a pencil” – as you can see I’ve disregarded that rule here. Actually the best piece of art advice I ever got was, “only follow advice if you are sure you understand it – and if you want to.”
So why do people say “don’t use a pencil”? Two reasons that I can see- one, beginning students have a tendency to get too tight with the drawing and two, because if the pencil drawing is wrong, your whole painting will be off. But I say, do what works for you.
So here I’ve completed the plein air, alla prima portion of the painting. The next step was to leave it in a stack of paintings for several weeks/months and then I pulled it out, touched it up, signed it, and here it is.