Pleinair Painting

THE COVID HOLDING PATTERN  I've logged several thousand air miles in my lifetime. And during those miles, there were many hours spent either on the ground waiting to fly or in the air waiting to land. The worst, in my opinion were the hours spent circling and circling in a holding pattern over the city that was your destination...waiting to land...waiting to land...waiting to land. Every half hour or so, the captain would get on to explain the situation, or sometimes not to explain it...but just to say something to the uncomfortable passengers. See, there were two problems. The first problem was not that we couldn't land, but that we had a destination to get to and we couldn't get there because something or someone was holding us up and we usually weren't told exactly what it was. The second problem was that we didn't know how long we were going to be up there circling and circling. The second problem was really the kicker. Because you could make contingency plans i...

MURALS FOR LLOYD BRIDGES TRAVELAND RV Back in 2002, I was asked to paint the largest mural of my painting career. The mural took 9 months to complete after I had toured several national parks in the Grand Circle out west. There were several challenges on the job. One was working with scaffolding that was 25ft in the air. When I was on the top level, the platform swayed with my brush movement, or when someone opened the bay doors. It was a little terrifying, so I worked with climbing gear and strapped myself to the ceiling. The second challenge was transferring the design to the wall. Often I use a projector to transfer since all I need is a simple outline to start getting the proportions right. But the site had huge windows in the front and there was no way to darken down the space with all the street lights. So I had to use an Old Master's Grid System transfer technique that took several days longer for each section. The other challenge was the blending of one scene into the next,...

"Red the Cow" the true story of a boy and his dairy cow is a book I've been illustrating the last few months. It's a beautiful story about a young boy who was given an older dairy cow to milk. Written as a rhyming Alphabet book, "Red the Cow" is an easy read for young children, but it also contains sidebars with lots of additional information about how farming was done in the 1950's. The illustrations were all done using models. I did the book this way because the characters ran all the way through the book and I wanted to maintain their likeness from illustration to illustration. The paintings are very realistic, but I took great license with the colors, pumping up the warms for a beautiful sunlit look. To be honest, this was done mostly to brighten my own mood during those long grey winter days in 2018. My favorite illustration is one of the saddest ones in the book. The main character discovers that his cow is no longer producing milk, and that...

I finally updated my website with a portfolio of my work. It's amazing to go through 20 years of work. It brought back so many memories. When I built my first website, it was important to keep the graphics small in order to not overload the web. Imagine that! So all the photos of my work were very small in order to allow users to load the information on their computers. It's taken many months to collect high resolution photos. Some of the murals were destroyed before I was able to get digital files of them. But there are some amazing images I can share. I've done over 150 murals over the years! I'll be adding more over the next few months, so be sure to visit often. I've also included several illustrations and commissioned works. Thanks for your interest in my work. Here's the link to the exciting new site: http://www.armscreekstudio.com

I just completed this portrait of three cousins. It's an oil on canvas, done with an indirect painting technique. I start with a transparent golden wash over the entire canvas and then work the lights and darks up from that base. I find it's a lovely base to start with for flesh tones and makes the whole canvas warm. These portraits were difficult for several reasons. First, I didn't have an opportunity to meet the children in person. Second, I had to work from lower res photos than I normally like to do. And third, I had to photoshop out several elements, replace heads and arms and try to make it not look like I did exactly that. Here is the photo shoppped photo that I worked from:   The finished painting is beautifully rich in color and texture compared to the photo. Another reason why paintings are so superior to photos if they are done with the intent to express an emotion or message and not just reproducing a photo.  Here is the full portrait with frame...

I had never painted an underwater landscape before this year. And my first one was 180 feet long by seven feet tall! This is a small section of a mural for Motts Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. The mural utilizes a special paint that gives the water and fish a glowing quality. Much like regular landscape painting, the colors fade off in the distance, only with water, the fade off is much faster and is more blue in tint. I was struck by the variety and populations of fish in the reefs. Although for my painting I assembled the very best combinations of color and texture, I was still was only able to capture a very small section of the massive variety of reef creatures. My studio changed considerably during the painting of this mural. Every morning I looked forward to coming into the studio, which had transformed itself into a large aquarium. The colors were comforting and calming. I was delighted with the creatures as they emerged and developed. Some plant life I made up...jus...

What a blast this was! I was notified about a month ago that my artwork won the Blue Man Group's Art Competition. They asked that I not post anything in social media about it until after the unveiling on Wednesday of this week. There was a notable cash prize, as well as a 10 ft x 10 ft blow-up of my artwork on the side of the Blue Man Group's theater in Chicago. And the original hangs in their lobby (photo above). The winning artwork fits their quirky performances that utilize splattered paint and other performance arts. We were told that there were 776 entries in the competition. I'm honored that my painting was one of the six winners! I saw the Blue Man Group perform many years ago and was struck by their grasp of what makes us human. The large screen behind them, giving instruction, is very clever in pointing out attributes of human nature that we take for granted. It's amazing to me that we are looking at artificial intelligence coming into our lives today with...