A Blog About Oil Painting
Welcome to my blog. Here you'll find me rambling on 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.
Fall at Oakland Green
by Simon Bland / 16 Apr 2015
Fall at Oakland Green. 11x14, oil on linen panel. 2015 In this painting I tried to capture the sense of fall by mixing all the colors with reds, oranges and yellows. The palette is phthalo blue, alizarin permanent, cad orange and cad yellow medium. This was based on some photos I took during a paint...
Kuku
by Simon Bland / 15 Apr 2015
Kuku. 12x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 This is one of those paintings that was stuck in my head and had to get out. The main idea behind the orange background was to do a painting that would complement the blue green in Portrait of 817. Although I didn't set out to have the orange so domi...
Hay Bales by Furnace Mountain
by Simon Bland / 12 Apr 2015
Hay Bales by Furnace Mountain. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 On the way home from a paint out last fall I stopped at the Point of Rocks boat ramp. Although nothing about the river caught my eye, on the way out I noticed a mowed field by the side of the ramp access road and felt it had some potentia...
Wicket
by Simon Bland / 09 Apr 2015
Wicket. 12x12, oil on linen panel. 2015. The wild rabbits living in our neighborhood are always at risk of being painted. This little chap was hiding under a bush the other day when I managed to take his picture without spooking him. He still had his winter coat and was adorably fluffy. The surface ...
Portrait of 817
by Simon Bland / 06 Apr 2015
Portrait of 817. 12x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 This is another painting on a medium texture linen. The surface is hard to photograph - a cellphone picture from the side shows the painting better than a head-on shot. The cow looks pretty much as she appeared in real life but the setting was too com...
Soft, Hard, Scrambled: Edges in a Chicken Study
by Simon Bland / 05 Apr 2015
Soft, Hard, Scrambled Edges. 10x8, oil on linen panel. 2015. This painting was done to practice edge-work and to serve as a study for a future painting. The surface is a medium texture linen, less smooth than the portrait grades that I use, consequently I had to use more paint than usual. I applied ...
A Small Portrait of Hannah
by Simon Bland / 30 Mar 2015
A Small Portrait of Hannah. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 A small painting of our dog, Hannah, that I painted this afternoon. I started it as a workshop demo which was subsequently scraped off - this is a smaller version or the original. I had already done a value study and a color study. That...
Separating Light from Shadow
by Simon Bland / 25 Mar 2015
Separate Light from Shadow (Rooster Head Study). 10x8, oil on linen panel. 2015. After teaching a small workshop yesterday where one of my themes was separating light from shadow, I decided to put some of my own advice into practice and do a sketch of the rooster at George's Mill Farm in Lovettsvill...
Bradford
by Simon Bland / 20 Mar 2015
Bradford. 14x11, oil on linen panel. 2015. The portrait sketch of Bradford is now finished. I made a few small tweaks to the nose and collar and did some general tidying up since it was first posted. ...