A Blog About Oil Painting

Great Northern’s Salmon Bay Bascule Bridge

by Simon Bland / Feb 9, 2016

Ballard Rail Bridge (plein air). 12x9, oil on linen panel. 2016 Are there some things that you feel compelled to do, but every time you try they end up kicking your butt? I think everybody has at least one. For me it is painting engineering structures. Having been educated as an engineer, I loo...

Alki Point

by Simon Bland / Feb 1, 2016

Alki Point. 5x7, oil and cold wax medium on linen panel. 2016 After seeing this view during a ferry ride to Bremerton, I did a small charcoal sketch of the scene. Since then I've made a few attempts to create it in paint, all of them abandoned. Today I decided to try again, this time on a small pane...

Some Forgotten Studies

by Simon Bland / Jan 16, 2016

In my studio I have a stack of sketches and studies. It's essentially a pile of doodles and ideas, things that I've hung on to in the anticipation that they can eventually be turned into real paintings, or things that might be helpful as I work on something further down the line. I created these stu...

Sunset

by Simon Bland / Dec 30, 2015

Sunset (cell phone pic of the painting). 5x7, oil on linen panel. 2015 A cloudless sky at sunset seems to dwarf the land and I am always drawn to the continuum of the color changes in the sky. The contrast of the warm sky against a flat landscape feels like something worth trying to capture. I came ...

Cottonwoods

by Simon Bland / Oct 19, 2015

Cottonwoods. 11x14, oil on linen panel. 2015. Today's paint out was at Great Country Farms in Bluemont, VA. This will probably end up being my last plein air of the year. This is one of the few locations (perhaps the only one?) in Loudoun County that has stands of cottonwood trees, so I made the mos...

Another View of Meadow Grove Farm

by Simon Bland / Oct 16, 2015

Trees at Meadow Grove Farm. 5x7, oil on linen panel. 2015 This small sketch was done earlier in the summer after a paint out at Meadow Grove Farm in Bluemont, VA. It's almost exactly the same view as another painting I did two years ago, but done at a different time of year. It's one of those scenes...