SOLD - Finishing Touches - Original Oil Painting of Children

A companion piece to the previous beach paintings -

Finishing Touches
Oil on Board, 6 by 6 inches
SOLD

My beach paintings would make a great display when combined, a collage like below.

Beach Paintings by Nithya Swaminathan

SOLD - Angry Bird - Original Palette Knife Oil Painting

I follow watercolour artist Sharon on facebook, and every month she holds a challenge where artists get to paint from a photo. The last couple of challenges were all animals and I loved looking at various interpretations though I did not participate in them. As I have mentioned a few times earlier, I am not very fond of painting animals. When she posted this eagle for the February challenge, I had made a mental note to take part. I had totally forgotten about it until it popped up again on my Facebook feed. 

I totally loved the reference and at first sight it just screamed "Palette Knife"! So of course, knife it had to be! Also, I have been neglecting my knives for a while now and thought this would be a good opportunity to warm up the knife painting muscle a bit.:-)

Angry Bird
Oil on Board, 6 by 6 inches
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I loved the reference, which is by wildlife photographer Gary Jones. The fire in the bird's eyes begged to be painted and I hope I have done justice to it. Do take a look at the various entries here, they are all amazing! Thank you so much for hosting the challenge, Sharon. It was a blast. 

SOLD - Team Work - Original Oil Painting of Children

I love scenes of children building sand castles. Watching them go about the process with all the seriousness gives me so much joy and the perfect opportunity for a lot of nice paintings. I have quite a few nice references and will be doing a couple of more pieces on this theme. They would make for a great collaged display too. 

Team Work
Oil on Board, 6 by 6 inches
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I find capturing wet sand extremely challenging, struggling to match the color and value every time I mixed it. Accommodating all the figures into the small canvas with the right proportions was a huge challenge too and I had fun! And I am quite happy with how this one turned out. 

SOLD - Under Construction - Original Painting of Children, 6 by 6 inches

Under Construction
Oil on board, 6 by 6 inches
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SOLD - Need no company - Original Figurative painting, 5 by 7 inches

As mentioned in the previous post, I am currently in the process of evaluating all my old pieces  to decide whether they can be revamped a bit or they could be painted over. This is one piece I decided to rework, which I am not sure if was the wiser thing to do. Looking back, probably repainting it on a new canvas would've served me better. Anyway! I had painted this more than 2 years back as part of my summer impressions. I did not like the end result but could not see what exactly was wrong. So it was just lying aside. 

When I picked it up for reworking now, the messed up proportions just glared at me. I wonder how I even considered this "finished" back then. However, I take this as an evidence that my artistic eye is getting better. Far from where I want it to be, but way better than what it was. 

Need no company

Oil on Canvas, 5 by 7 inches

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Here's a collage of the two paintings side by side. The left was painted in 2011 and the right one yesterday. Can you say what all has been changed? :-) 

The colors seem much brighter than they are in real, especially the reds. The others are as close as possible to the original. 

SOLD - The Onlookers

Over the last few days, I have been taking stock of my old paintings in the process of deciding which ones to trash and which ones to keep. There are some that I will be reworking a bit in an attempt to make them better. Most will be ruthlessly trashed. It was during one such reworking that I came across this reference from a few years ago. I had painted a different part of it, and this time, these two women caught my attention. 

I tried to include some houses in the background hills, but wiped them off later in a change of mind. Wanted to keep it simple with the focus on just the figures. 

The onlookers
Oil on board, 6 by 6 inches
SOLD

SOLD - Juicy - Original Citrus Still Life in Oils, 12 by 6 inches

After fretting over all those figures and shadows, I wanted to loosen up and paint something really quick. This is one of my big goals for the year and the near future, to pick up the larger brushes as much as I can and to paint looser. It is very easy for me to reach out to my tiny brushes and get really fussy over too much detail. It is only when I pause to look at the painting do I realise more often than not that I have overworked it. Most of the times I don't know when to stop. 

But for all my intentions to use the bigger brushes etc, I find this extremely difficult when doing figures. The best way to get started was to paint something with more broader shapes than figures and this reference was just perfect. So when I was looking for Painted this for the Citrus Challenge on DPW. 

Juicy
Oil on Canvas, 12 by 6 inches
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I use the largest brush and it was done in just over an hour. And I was forced to stop as my napping daughter got up and that was my alarm :-D 

SOLD - Dads and Moms!

This painting has taken me about 10 days from start to finish, probably the longest I have worked on a piece in a very long time. The sketch itself took me quite some time to get the proportions and the angles right. The last two weeks have been miserable on the health front with the entire family, so that partly accounts for the delay too. 

The reference has been sitting in my system forever, but I never finalised on a crop, on which part f the image I wanted to paint. As I was trying out sketching different parts of the image, this mad woman in me wanted to paint ALL of them :-) With that lightbulb moment, I cropped off the heads and some other parts that I wasn't interested in and decided to tackle the figures all at once. I am pretty sure I will be painting the different families in separate paintings too. 

Dads and Moms
Oil on Canvas, 12 by 6 inches
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A scene such as this is such a common sight here in summer, when young families flock to places like the zoo and parks nearby. I clicked this at the entrance of one such park that we frequent. I had a great time painting this one and I am reasonably satisfied with the outcome. Hope you like it too!