The Naked Silo

30" x 36", oil on canvas, 2013 The ninth painting (although there's no real order, unless you want to infer one) in my Tournament of Shadows series, this a sort of sequel to Between Maybe and Maybe Not . Below are in-progress details in the order I painted them: Here I am reusing my photo ref previously used in an earlier watercolour,  Aisha (pensive) . There are still some very bright highlights to add. Click the skull for a larger-than-life view (depending on your screen size, of course). Surrounded by the orange ground makes everything look weird and possibly warmer than intended, especially the raven. Another earlier watercolour,  evade , makes a cameo. Nearly done and covering up most of my orange ground, the values of the subjects settle themselves down now and indicate that they're not weird, after all.

18" x 24", oil on canvas, 2013 I've posted before about my love of photography and the SLR film camera I used to use extensively to shoot my photo reference for my paintings, and I've painted a different, older, non-functional film camera quite a bit (most recently and most pointedly in My Advantage Point ). However, the cost of film photography combined with my novice-like understanding of F-stops, etc. made switching to a digital SLR (which, aside from the occasional auto-focus feature, I use in its manual setting, to replicate using my Minolta) this past summer all the more convenient, economical, and photographically certain. I can now instantly see if I'm getting the exposure I want/need and only have to print the photos I choose (with a bit of post-processing and recomposing with other photos in Photoshop) to use as reference for my artwork. I still love the process of film photography and the sophisticated-yet-low-tech nature of it, and the camera...