I remember during the trip to O’ahu, we spent most of our time hanging around the usual tourist places in Honolulu. On the last day, thanks to a late flight, we drove around the island for some adventure. We came across some really good viewing spots on the North Shore of O’ahu for watching both surfing and sunset. There were some pretty handsome roosters too.
It’s vacation time and I dug out some paintings from previous Hawaiian trips.
I couldn’t remember if this was sunset or sunrise, or maybe it’s just a feeling or memory. One thing I hope this blog would achieve is better documentation of my efforts.
I did some cleaning today and found a few old paintings. None of them was dated and my memory is just a blur. The only thing I could say is they were done around or before 2015. Lesson learned: date your artwork.
This one is after a photo I found online. Here’s the link, but I don’t know how to find the photographer’s information. (Google image search leads me to furniture stores and all sort of club chairs.) So, whoever took the beautiful photo, thank you. You can see back then I wasn’t able to go beyond the reference.
Now some flowers for the holidays:
The original:
My copy:
Cézanne’s original is packed with details, there’s subtle changes of color and value on every plane of the house. The trees are built with expressive but economic strokes. I got lost among the leaves.
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is probably the most influential Post-Impressionist artist, and definitely the most inspiring for me. His colors are layered and strokes deliberate. It takes a lot more work than it seems. In this study I copied only a small section of the original painting.
Original:
My copy:
I only recently came to know there’s such a thing called ink resist, and was pretty impressed by some of the artworks with this method. So I gave it a try. The result is a meh, but I l had fun and learned something.
So these are the steps I followed:
And here are the things I learned:
This is a study done when I first experimented with acrylic (or painting with anything). I stared at the original for days couldn’t figure out how to achieve that sense of unity. Eventually I decided to paint the whole canvas with a dark shade of burnt sienna and “drawing” on top of it.
Original (from vangoghonline.com)
My copy:
ZHI SU 
