A Blog About Oil Painting
Welcome to my blog. Here you'll find me rambling on, unassisted by AI, about all sorts of things related to art in general and oil painting in particular. There's even a recipe for dog cookies hidden away somewhere.
Like the rest of the site, this section is still a work in progress and I will be making it tider and easier to navigate in time. There is a lot of content, so using the buttons below may help you to get around. Newest posts are shown first.
Some Fall Studies - Exploring Color in the Fall Landscape
by Simon Bland / 03 Nov 2016
Fall Study I. 5x10, oil on linen panel. 2016 Fall Study 2. 5x10, oil on linen panel. 2016 These are a couple of studies I've done to explore some ideas for a new painting. I'm trying to create something that will fit a frame that's currently on an older, unsold work. Since I had some opportunity to...
How Do I Paint a Fishing Boat?
by Simon Bland / 01 Nov 2016
Blue Pacific (study). about 6x10, oil on linen. 2016 The Fisherman's Terminal in Seattle is potential goldmine of artistic opportunity but the imagery is hard to capture when working on location. A painting partner described it as "the black diamond slope of plein air painting". The problem is...
Lupine Meadow From a Study
by Simon Bland / 27 Oct 2016
Lupine Meadow. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2016 This is another painting that I've done from one of the "sketch marathon" set of studies. I put this one off for a while as I wanted to work on something larger that I thought would be more interesting. However, that one turned out to be a scraper while ...
North Bluff From a Study
by Simon Bland / 23 Oct 2016
North Bluff. 9x12, oil on linen. 2016 In the early summer I worked on a series of sketches and studies, trying to complete one or two small paintings every day over the course of a month. In addition to using them as a learning exercise, my original goal was to eventually turn some of them into larg...
Tater and Madeleine
by Simon Bland / 04 Oct 2016
Tater and Madeleine. 16x20, oil on linen. 2016 Here's a look at the latest portrait that I'm just finishing. It was originally intended to be a sketch, but all the ideas that I worked on in the design stage eventually coalesced into this more finished affair. The reference photos were taken inside w...
Edges
by Simon Bland / 25 Sep 2016
Edge Study, black and white oil paint, about 8x10. 2016 I'm finishing up my book on painting animals. You knew I was writing a book, right? On reading through the manuscript once again, I finally admitted to myself that it needed a better discussion of edges - something I'd tried to avoid because it...
Fishing Boat WIP
by Simon Bland / 19 Sep 2016
Vampy (WIP). 12x12, oil on linen panel. 2016 You know it's been a long and difficult painting day when the trash bag that contains your discarded paper towels weighs more than the plywood panel you were painting on. This side view is a painting that I was working on and really struggling with today....
Meadow Land. A Re-Worked Painting
by Simon Bland / 16 Sep 2016
Meadow Land. 6x11 approx., oil on linen panel. 2016 Over the course of the year the reject pile in my studio has grown ever larger. Even though I often purge it of the truly bad stuff, it still holds more work than I'd like. To this end, I decided to split the pile into four smaller groups: Things ...
Darla R, Plein Air Painting of a Fishing Boat
by Simon Bland / 15 Sep 2016
Darla R (plein air). 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2016 I spent most of the day at Seattle's Fisherman's Terminal painting on the main dock. The morning started out overcast and gray which made for ideal painting conditions. Although I originally worked on a smaller panel, I came to my senses, scraped i...