oilpainting – Tyra Oliver Art

Still life study

682CE8F2-0F59-4C01-8110-641C132E5BFA — General shapes penciled in. No details are worked at this point. The photo doesn’t capture it but I have a singular light source which is the lamp on the upper right.

Underpainting block in — Dark areas are placed with thinned raw umber. The white here is the white of the canvas.

DCB36E73-BDB5-4DEF-9AC6-7F92A104FEC6 — Dark areas are reinforced with a mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. I mixed a good chunk of that color and mixed increasing quantities of titanium white. This created a 5 value string of grey to define forms.

The above is a progression shot of a pumpkin study. Because it is best to narrow ones focus when engaging in work of this nature, this still life painting serves a few functions:

1 – I wanted to reinforce value composition as that has been an afterthought on many of my paintings.

2 – I want to work with muted colors. Relying on a bunch of bright colors all the time is not always the most effective way to work.
3 – I do want to continue painting in layers however, I want to have a streamlined system for doing this so I don’t always wonder how to go about getting from beginning to end.

Finished Paintings

oilpainting, Uncategorized

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I have completed a few projects as of late.

“Virtuous Mother and Child” 8×10 oil on panel

“Sword of Righteousness” 9×12 oil on panel

I will varnish them early next year. I’ll also be listing originals in Etsy. Right now I am just excited to execute on new ideas. I’ll also be churning out more video content on YouTube.

Completed Painting

oilpainting

I have just finished my latest painting ” Escape From Babylon”. The concept is based upon this mysterious pair of sojourners who are aware of the carnage happening in the distance.

Escape From Babylon, oil on canvas panel 12×16

I wanted to use this painting as an opportunity to pull viewers into the universe that I’ve introduced. That being said, my current and future works do have an interwoven narrative. This narrative will feature standard fantasy tropes and Judeo-Christian themes that I hold dear. Seeing this painting is basically like watching a novelist write a book by the paragraph; or by the sentence as it’s being written. As I build my body of work viewers get a chance to piece everything together and explore the world as it’s being constructed….almost like a scavenger hunt!

If you want to look under the hood, this video shows me working on a portion of this painting. In addition to following this blog, subscribe to the YouTube channel. We are already working on more content so there will be some pretty awesome things happening there including more footage of paintings being created.

Thanks for stopping by!

Uncategorized

During #eclipse2017 I was able to paint 2 plein air things to commemorate an event that my eyeballs would never witness again. You see, I’m in North Carolina and we didn’t get the full eclipse. If it wasn’t turning pitch black I figured it wouldn’t be anything special. I didn’t have glasses or anything so I couldn’t look at the actual sun do I wasn’t going to do anything other than stay inside and scrape paint off of my big glass palette. My artist twin, Taisa called me and told me that the sky was a very interesting shade of desaturated blue and that she was going to try to match the color on swatches with markers. I got off the phone and a few minutes later the eclipse had progressed a bit more. My dad called and I didn’t think he would be interested at all. He’s not even an artist so he doesn’t care about which Pantone color the sky is. He said it looked ‘funny’ so at that point I had to go out and look. After looking out and seeing that the sky was indeed slightly off in color, I broke down my little easel, grabbed a few small canvases, and haphazardly grabbed my paints to mix up something before the event was over.

Here are the results of my half-hearted attempt to be a bit relevant. These turned out to be very abstracted depictions of the sky and tree line as I was more concerned with color accuracy.

I don’t know what I want to do with these. I suppose I can list them in Etsy.

At at any rate, speaking of things going on in the sky, I hope anyone who was affected by Harvey is able to make a way, you’ll be in my thoughts and prayers.