I thought I would challenge myself with a bit of an epic painting that I have been wanting to do for a while. I have chosen a couple of photos I took many years ago whilst at Nappa Merri Station.

To set the scene, we had spend a day drafting the cattle and they were due to be trucked out the following day, so late that afternoon the cattle to be trucked were taken back to this channel on the Cooper for a drink.

This is the main image that has inspired the painting.

I think it needs more background to give some better perspective with the dust settling on the water as the cattle come in for a drink. So this is the other image I will use, it was taken just prior to the main photo.

The first step will be to sketch the main cattle in the foreground, I can sketch the others straight to canvas, but want to make sure I get the close up ones right, so with the images on my tablet I sketched the main animals.

There were a few other sketches in addition to these, so after that they were completed combined them all together in Photoshop and traced the full sketch onto the canvas.

I dare say it is probably a bit hard to see but you might be able to get the general idea.

Anyway the next step is to block in all the different areas with a lean mix of paint, this is called under-painting.

So that is where I am up to at the moment, I'm not sure how long this one will take, I will be doing other paintings during the process so will update this blog after I get another go at it.

18th April 2017

It has taken longer than I would have hoped to get back to this painting but I did get a chance over Easter to do complete the under-painting. The following photos show the progress

Having the image on a tablet beside me when painting is a great help, much better that just a photo as I can zoom in on detail to isolate areas when I need to.

The great think about doing the under-painting is that I can see, sort of, what the painting is going to look like. If I'm happy with it at this stage then it usually turns out pretty good. I think this looks good, so now for the exciting, if not a little time consuming, part, putting in all the detail. Hopefully I will get to it soon.

28th April:

I am lucky enough to have a bit of time today so I can get stuck into this painting again. The next step is to tape up all the trees so I can just put the background in without having to worry about them, this makes it easier to paint in the trunks latter without having wet paint all over them. Also I don't waste the planning that I have done earlier on their placement.

Took a bit of time and looks a bit messy but will be worth it in the long run. Now I can mix my colours for the sky, it was overcast and dusty on this particular day, in fact it was the day of the big dust storm, so there will be no bright blues, just a mix of greys and light browns.

This shows the sky painted in over the tape, from here I remove all the tape, and start putting in all the details. My apologies but I got a bit involved with the painting and forgot to take any photos. This next image shows all of the background completed, well I think it is, but will have to wait and see, they say a good artist knows when to stop, so hopefully I'm a good artist.

Pretty much all that is left now are the front group of cattle, I can really start putting some tones and colour into these and some thick paint. Up to now all the background has been fairly subdued with no heavy paint. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

Will be mid week before I can get to it again. So fingers crossed I will finish it latter this week.

May 5th.

Happy to say I have completed this painting, and have to admit it has probably been the most complex and time consuming one to date, but definitely worth it as it looks amazing. Is probably the hardest one I have had so far to part with, probably because of my experences with the subject matter. 

I hope you enjoyed the progress of this painting.

Cheers

Mark 

This is a painting I completed over the Christmas period, it is something that I have been wanting to paint for a while but knew I would need several days where I could get stuck into it, so Christmas was a good time, no pressure to get it done. 

I was given a bunch of photos of a large mob of mares and foals crossing the Cloncurry River some time ago. As with many of my paintings I have combined several photos to arrive at a final composition.

So that was the first step..to decide what I was going to paint, the next step was to start sketching.

I often us a grid when I am sketching so it is quicker and easier to get the proportion right, however this time I just went freehand, I wasn't worried about the size, it is much easier to sketch big, I will put everything together in the right proportions in Photoshop latter.

Once I had the main horse sketches complete I photographed and took them into Photoshop, here I combined them to match the original photos and adjusted their size so the perspective was right. This is what it looked like in Photoshop.

This is how the horses will be positioned, the right hand group are coming out of some deep water and the other ones are going around it. This is going to be a large painting, almost a metre wide. After I transferred this to the canvas the first thing to do was an under painting, which is basically a rough painting without detail and highlights.

In the under painting you can see that the horses don't have a lot of detail in them and the background, especially the grass bank needs more work. Also the water has just roughly been painted in.

Here I am putting in detail, being a large painting it did take quite a bit of time. You will notice that I have a tablet beside the painting as my guide and reference, this is a great thing to have as it lets me zoom right in on any detail etc. You will also notice that I have turned the foal behind the depth indicator around so it is coming into the painting, but one thing I decided that I did not like was the mare behind that foal heading out of the painting to the left. So in the next photo you will see that I have painted a horse coming straight on, which fixes that issue.

The water was a bit of a challenge and compositionally I almost decided to make cut some of the bottom of the painting off because I felt there was to much empty space there but I have decided to leave it in, the painting is about a flooded river so I think it adds to the drama. Talking about drama, I did add some storm clouds into the background to make things look a little more threatening.

And that's the end product. I hope you enjoyed that insight the story about creating this painting.

Cheers and kind regards

Mark

If I was asked that question out of the blue, I'd say that I haven't got a clue.

Wow...there's some rhyming  poetry and I didn't even realise, honest, just picked it up on a re-read.

In a way my paintings are very much like that, I haven't got a definite plan when I first think, right it's time to come up with a new painting, sure I have lots of ideas that I think will make good paintings...so many ideas and so little time, but the actual composition and elements of the painting have to be developed, and that's where the fun starts.

So to answer the question, 'Where does the original idea come from'? I will describe the process for a painting I am currently doing.

The first step is to find an image that I really like, I have lots of photos, and by lots, I mean a serious lot. 

With this current painting I wanted to paint something from my trip to the Snowy Mountains earlier this year, and I remember taking a photo of a particular tree in the holding paddock where all the cattle were while we had lunch. 

  So this is the tree, I just really liked something about it and am going to build this painting around it, all the photos I will use were taken in this paddock after lunch when we were pushing the cattle together. I will add a horse, rider and some cattle and combine them together with the tree to create what I hope will be a good painting, and importantly an accurate representation of what happened.

These are the two photos I used for the horse and cattle, I chose the one of Rowdy and his dogs on the left because I liked the horses pose, the way Rowdy is sitting on the horse, and the two dogs, also very importantly they are going in the right direction for what I wanted. I didn't want a large mob of cattle so was just after a couple of head that were also going in the right direction,  I have circled the two in the photo on the right that I will use. The background was fairly messy in these two shots so I wanted to simplify it a bit, so I went in search of a photo that would give me ideas for a less cluttered background. 

The process of combining all of the components together in Photoshop lets me see if they all work together okay. When doing this you have to play with the scale of the different components to get the perspective right, as all the photos were taken at the same time of day I will not have to alter the lighting much when I do the painting.

This is the combined image I have ended up with, you will notice that I have put a tree in on the left hand side to balance it up and frame the action in the middle of the scene. I will need one at the back as well, two trees don't seem to work, three always seems better. Also I will probably add a fence in, to tie in with the original photo of the main tree. It doesn't look that great at the moment but once I sketch it onto the canvas I will alter the things a bit so it all works. 

Well that's it for now, I will photograph the painting progress and have those plus the finished painting as the topic for discussion in the next blog, if it goes as planned, talk to you then. 

Kind regards

Mark

Now that the planning stage is finished I have stretched the canvas, and sketched all the elements in. The next step which you see in the photo above is to put masking tape over the main tree trunks, this makes putting in the far background much easier and simplifies the whole process. Oh, and it looks great when you pull the tape off.

Now the painting can start, the first thing I do is roughly paint in all the tones of the landscape, ensuring to drop the intensity and lighten things up as they go further back. 

I decided not to roughly paint in the animals at this point, will do that when I get the background finished, which you can see I have done in this next photo.

In completing the background I have added in some darker tones and highlights to put form into the trees, also I placed quite a few sticks, stumps and logs on the ground, just to replicate how things actually were. Also you will notice a fence going across and receding out to the right. I put this is, not only because there was one in the original "Tree" photo, but mainly to give some sense to the direction the cattle are going in.

It is always a lot of fun pulling the masking tape off, suddenly the trees just seem to pop out of the painting, can't wait to get some paint on them. However I decided to paint in the "Last two" at this point, when I starting adding in the dark foreground colours things really start looking nice. The next step will be to block in the main foreground elements.

So it is starting to look pretty good, I have got all the tones pretty right I think, now I just have to add the highlights and extra detail. I've been looking forward to this part, especially adding thick paint for the bark and tree texture. Also adding in the foliage took some work to ensure the direction of light was correct.

You might notice that I changed the colour of the horse, he was originally a dark brown colour in the photo but I decided to warm him up into a chestnut. It's amazing how it all comes together in the end, those who have been following me for a while will know that I don't usually paint many trees, but I did enjoy these ones, guess I will have to do more in the future. I had a frame already made so have just sat it in lightly for a final photo opportunity.

I hope you you found this interesting.

Until next week, .... putting pressure on myself there to keep up a regular blog.., stay safe and talk to you then.

Cheers Mark

Well I have to say that was a bit of fun, did take a while, and got a bit fiddly with the harness but I am very happy with the final result. 

I though a nice dark storm with lots of rain in the background would be not only be dramatic but is probably at the top of the Christmas wish list for many.

 I got the masking tape out again, I figured it would be good to have something for that the lead horse with the arched neck to be looking at, so I have applied some tape in the shape of a road sign so I can paint it in latter.

Background finished except for the road sign.

Got the big guy in his sleigh done, I decided to leave the big red coat on because it no doubt gets cold up there in the clouds.

Took the tape off and painted in the road sign, I decided put the harness in very roughly just to give a guide for when filling in the horses

It took a little while to decide what colour to make the horses, initially I wanted to go with greys, but thought they might clash with the clouds a bit, so I went with four bays. I have made them fairly red to fit in with the Christmas colour scheme.

Just the harness, boots and wraps to go, these will give me the opportunity to add some Christmas colour.

And as a final touch I just had to add a bit of lightning, anyway

Merry Christmas, I hope this has put a smile on your face and that all your Christmas wishes come true. I'm look forward eagerly to continuing my painting journey in 2017 and hope you can come along as well. 

Kind Regards 

Mark

So at what point can I call myself an artist?

A few months ago I was at a business improvement seminar and as a means of introduction we all took it in turns explaining what we did for a living. As my turn approached the heart rate increased and I was tossing up what I should say, in the past my job description has always been Photographer/Videographer, but this time I thought stuff it.

So when my turn came I simply said I was an "Artist", and for some reason I couldn't help but think that everyone else in the room thought I was joking, and ridiculously I almost felt the same, so with an elevated heart rate I stumbled on to say ," Yeh but I also do commercial video production and photography"...why did I do that? why couldn't I have just left it as Artist?

For some reason it feels strange to call myself an artist, it's not that I don't believe that I am an artist, I think the word "Artist" has always represented something that I felt was unachievable, so maybe I am lacking the confidence to make that final step of calling myself an artist.

I had to go into hospital just last week for a colonoscopy...now this is not something I would recommend as an enjoyable experience, anyway on the form there was a spot for career....and guess what, yeh, that's right, I wrote ..."Photographer" old habits die hard. 

Why do I keep doing that? anyway....it's not a mater of "can I call myself an artist", as something I love doing and am making a career of  "I must call myself and artist"... so from this day on it's Mark Coombe the Artist.

For those of you new to my art, I live near Rockhampton in central Queensland and paint my interpretation of the things that make life on the land special to me. My studio is fairly basic, a small bedroom that is no longer used on the northern side of the house, the best thing about it is that everything is set up and there is great natural light coming in the big window. 

I made the easel from plans found on the internet and it seems to work pretty well. I use photos loaded on a tablet as reference to paint from, the great thing about this is that I can easily zoom in on details and isolate colours, I have a few anatomy pics of horses on the wall which are essential for getting legs right etc.. Oh and the curtains are a bit of a problem, handy for blocking out direct sun, but they are tending to get a bit splattered with paint, guess that just goes with the territory.

That's all for this week, next week I am going to show what goes into developing the concept of a painting prior to starting.

Please share with anyone you might think will be interested.

Cheers and stay safe

Mark

Now that it's December I figure it's time to get my Christmas painting sorted, this is the one I did last year, I guess it's okay, it even has the Southern Cross but I want to spark it up a bit this year, try and add a bit of the magic that is Christmas. So I was looking for some inspiration and found this photo in google images.

Isn't it great, I don't want to copy it, but it has given me the inspiration I needed, so now I'm thinking, horses pulling the sleigh instead of reindeer, probably been done before but I'll put my spin on it. So now I can get a bit creative, no boundaries here, I can do whatever I want, to be honest, after the large number of commission I have done over the past couple of months, and don't get me wrong I love doing them but this does feel like a bit of a release.

So I am excited. The first step will be sketching, usually I use a grid of some sort to get the proportions right but I won't this time, just go with what looks right.

Sorry I didn't start taking photos earlier but this is what I have at the moment, not really sure where it is going, I'm going to have four horses and probably have them coming down from the sky (that's the magic bit) and across some outback road or something. 

I decided with this last horse to arch his neck and put the head down a bit, just to give some variation, I had a bit of fun with that horse at the back with his head up and ears back, I'm not that happy with the closest horses head so I might change that a bit.

Yeh that looks pretty good, it will change no doubt when I start adding some paint, but the basic composition looks good and the concept is developing into what I had in my head to begin with.

As the song goes, "Oh what fun it is to ride, on a 'Four' horse Open Sleigh" or something like that.

Plenty of things to decide on such as horse colour, what the background will be etc.... and I'll probably change Santa's traditional outfit so he can handle the heat.

Anyway, it's a work in progress, will keep you posted.

Cheers