onionpainter

[onionpainter]

I have got the cans

i will never need to buy ultramarine or burnt umber ever again

#chatter

[onionpainter]

My new updated painting plans for this year

ah yes, time for some genuine blogging

There's a gallery in the province I am moving to that I have plans to court, but before I make contact with them I must built a portfolio that is tailored to their customer base. I have compiled a list of attributes of the paintings they have sold and compared it to the list of skills I already decently possess, and the portfolio I will make will be of this: livestock and possibly wildlife in local landscapes using the blue to orange range as my main colour theme. if i work efficiently i will be able to produce 10 paintings in this portfolio in one year and I will plan to contact them in summer of 2025.

other goals for 2024 include finally getting a handle on printing and dealing with that side of the business. I can only apologize for the print delay, im decent at making pictures but im just awful at making websites and online business type things with any higher complexity than personally selling things to people via messages. a buddy of mine is going to help me out with this.

more immediately though, I will be opening commissions once I get my studio set up in my new place [will make a post later with all the info for that] AND i'll start off with a few new onion paintings to shake the rust off. [the new onion paintings I have planned will be small square pictures which I'll offer the originals for sale and offer prints if they are any good]

thank you for reading, if you have any painting or art plans for 2024 i'd love to hear about them in the replies! c):)

#chatter

[onionpainter]

do you do plein air?

This picture was started plein aire and finished in the studio [froze my hands off doing this, it was -1c and windy]

and this one was done fully plein aire

i got one more plein aire picture but it's not a finished painting, it was another colour study of Flint Rock Ranch. Other than those havent done much plein aire painting yet but Im planning to do more of it once I move! You really cant beat plein aire in terms of colour accuracy so I'll be trying to get out and do that as much as i can in order to support my studio work with colour studies and then work my way up to doing complete paintings in the field.

Thanks for asking! :)

[side note: i want a pochade box so bad]

#asks #if youve sent me an ask and i havent answered u yet i sincerely apologize #i will try and get up to date+more active on this blog once im settled in my new place

[onionpainter]

For an onion painter you sure do paint alot of not oinions

(Love ur art its very pretty)

haha yeah, i should change my url to cowpainter or smth

#asks

[onionpainter]

PAINTING SALE - Click through the images, they are numbered and titled.

Come Home, 20"x20", framed - 500usd+shipping [30usd]

4 Angus Cattle, 12"x10", framed - 300usd+shipping [20usd

2 Angus Cattle, 12"x12", not framed - 180usd+shipping [15usd]

Straw Bales, 7"x13", framed - 180usd+shipping [15usd]

To claim a painting please write the title of the one you want in the comments AND please DM me with your mailing address! then I can send a payment link via stripe. If you are outside of the USA+Canada the shipping may cost a bit more depending on where you are located so in that case I will send the payment link for the shipping after I have mailed it.

If you're not in the market for paintings right now but you want to support my work, a reblog would be very much appreciated, thank you! :))

[onionpainter]

English Paint Horse Grazing

8"x12"

Oil on canvas

#oil painting #painting #sold

[onionpainter]

you inspire me

hey that is so nice to hear!!! :)) I am transferring my powers to you. you are so strong, strong enough to pursue that thing u desire. you are surrounded by a sickening green glow of determination, crackling with electricity.

#asks

[onionpainter]

Red Angus Steer Trotting (Study)

8.5"x7"

Oil on linen board

#oil painting #painting #sold

[onionpainter]

Bison

12"x12"

Oil on linen - commission

#oil painting #painting #commission #not for sale

[onionpainter]

Percheron studies from the Stampede last summer.

Remember: painting is just drawing and drawing is 80% observation. You can't paint accurate representations if you don't look.

#these are not perfectly accurate sketches but i learned a whole lot of visual info by doing them #and in my defense: horses do move around #this was the draft horse decorating competition [braiding the manes and tails and putting their ribbons in] so they were pretty still #but htey do sort of ambiently shuffle around so there was a real time limit to recording the information #sketch #anyway: take every chance you can get to draw your preferred subject from life #Aaron Blaise has some videos about this on youtube if you're interested in drawing animals from life

[onionpainter]

cow practice

this is a little study for my big painting of cows, which i have now had on the easel for 8 months. my expectations for that painting are pretty high, but like everyone else my technical ability fluctuates day by day, which is why it's so important to do smaller exercises during the working period of a big important picture. only working on the big picture and not taking into account whether my hand is sharp or dull that day is a great way to destroy months of work.

Anyway, the big picture is nearly complete, i have 4 cows heads left to finalize and then some barbed wire to install. I will be very happy when it's time to put this picture away to cure for four months!

#oil painting #wip #sold #painting

[onionpainter]

"Come Home" Oil on canvas 20"x20"

Boy this painting was real difficult to make! I found out a few months ago that the local arts contest that i was making THIS picture for actually had a perimeter limit of 100"! and that thing is 52"x26" so it categorically cannot be submitted. So I took a break on that one and put together the design for this picture based on a thumbnail sketch I drew last winter:

I did all of the painting process during May, which is crazy fast for me [you may notice its generally less "tight" than most of my other work, but for one month i think it's not bad.] It was a good challenge to get it done so quickly and I can paint faster now!

#oil painting #painting

[onionpainter]

Straw Bales, 7"x13"

Oil on Canvas

Instagram

#painting #oil painting

[onionpainter]

Four Black Angus Cattle

Oil on canvas, 12"x10"

Instagram

Process:

I just bought a new camera so as I get my bearings with it I will try my best to rephotograph and offer prints of my older pictures now that I have a decent camera. Thanks for reading!

#painting

[onionpainter]

In your pallete post you say that if you want to build up your skills you could only use burnt umber and white :0? Is there a reason burnt umber would be better than pure black and white?

Hello anon, that is a GREAT question!

My short answer is that burnt umber is a very versatile and forgiving pigment to use, whereas black pigments [ivory black, mars black, etc] have less uses in colour mixing, are more difficult to handle, and can cause archival problems down the line, like cracking.

Further discussion and a commentary on this chart is under the readmore.

The colours mixed on the chart above were made with approximately the same amounts of paint as each other, to show how the different pigments interact.

The main thing to consider about black pigments is that they are NOT neutral in therms of hue, so if you try to darken a mix by adding black, the mix will also be pushed towards blue [for the purpose of paint mixing, we can think of black pigments as dark blue], which is usually not the colour direction intended by the artist.

A better alternative is to mix your own black colour using Burnt Umber and Ultramarine, which gives you more control over exactly what colour of black you want to make, be it more brown or more blue.

So if you are mixing your own black with burnt umber and ultramarine, the circumstance where an actual black pigment would be of use presents itself only when your subject is darker than what can be achieved via brown+blue. A similar situation to this one would be a circumstance where you need to paint something that is more blue green than ultramarine can produce, so its time to bring out the pthalo blue. These stronger pigments are sometimes called "Power Colours" and are used to supplement a limited palette.

The reason I recommend burnt umber as a beginner pigment is because it mixes well with other colours without overpowering them AND if you are just doing value studies with burnt umber and white, it's a much better time investment to learn the value scale in because burnt umber has way more applications in full colour painting than black does.

#info #asks

[onionpainter]

In the absence of any completed work, here is my palette and some personal recommendations under the readmore.

Colour List:

Burnt Umber* Cadmium Red Light* Quinacridone Red Permanent Alizarin* Quinacridone Magenta Ivory Black Burnt Sienna Cadmium Yellow Deep Cadmium Yellow Pale* Hansa Yellow Cobalt Teal Phthalo Blue French Ultramarine* Titanium White*

As you can see, some of these colours have asterisks on them, that's because those are the colours that make up my Limited Palette: Permanent Alizarin Cadmium Red Light Burnt Umber Cadmium Yellow Pale French Ultramarine Titanium White

These are the pigments that I consider essential, and the ones that I started learning oil realism with back in 2018 [actually I have just started using cadmium red light, because of all the orange cows i deal with these days. Back in the day I only used the other five.]

There are many benefits to using a limited palette, first of all it's cheaper to buy 5 or 6 colours rather than every pigment on the shelf, but more importantly, oil realism is really an exercise in colour mixing, and it is much easier starting out to learn all the possible combinations of 5 colours vs learning all the possible combinations of 14 colours. I would actually recommend beginners start with only burnt umber and titanium white if you are very serious about building your technical skills and can withstand the allure of bright and exciting pigments.

#info #as of this moment 5/23 cows are completed to an acceptable standard

[onionpainter]

Pinned Post

He/him, 29

Hello, I make oil paintings in the impressionist realist style.

This is my painting tag for ONLY paintings

This is my instagram account

Twitter

Prints are currently unavailable due to the difficulty of sourcing acceptable quality printing. I will be looking into doing a limited run of prints of the "Onions" picture sometime in the future via preorder once I secure an adequate printing service.

Commissions are closed until late 2024 at the earliest (I have a lot of time sensitive painting plans and a move coming up. Will post an alert when I am ready to take comms again!)

I tend to delete past WIP/candid posts and asks unless it is a technical question or advice [I do this because I mainly want to keep this blog as a catalogue of work]

🧅Thanks for reading🧅