A Blog About Oil Painting

Charcoal Sketch of a Gloucestershire Old Spot

by Simon Bland / Dec 31, 2015

Gloucestershire Old Spot. Charcoal on paper, 11x24 (approx). 2015. In this sketch I'm working on the layout for a painting of a pig I met at Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, VA. Sketching it out like this lets me see the image without any of the clutter in the photograph. The abstract idea is to have a ...

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 ...

More Beach Painting

by Simon Bland / Dec 29, 2015

Bainbridge Island (plein air). 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 Today I managed to get back to the beach for my last plein air effort of 2015. It was less windy than the last outing but still fairly cold. After my experiences on the first outing I made a knotted bag that can be filled with stones to k...

Bunny in Progress

by Simon Bland / Dec 22, 2015

Bunny (WIP). 14x11, oil on linen panel. 2015. It's been a while since I finished any new work so I jumped the gun and posted this one before completing it. This is done from the customer's own photograph. This first layer is painted directly over a (dried) raw umber block in and was done in one sess...

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...

Return to Trough Hill Farm

by Simon Bland / Sep 29, 2015

Corner of the Field. 8x10, oil on linen panel. 2015 Today's paint out was a return to Trough Hill Farm in Middleburg, VA. The sky was overcast and dark all morning. Fortunately the rain held off until mid afternoon. After walking around the property I settled on a corner of one of the back fields as...