Angry Duck Studio

After Wisham Fisherman and Nordic Landscape,
I needed to paint something ridiculous. Please find it below.

Potato Chips (A Balancing Act)
Acrylic on 24" x 16" scrap board from Ikea (cost $0.10)

I wanted to draw a bowl of potato chips, not sitting on a flat table, but instead on something curvy. How about balanced between two hills? Hmm.

The funny thing is that I just told someone today that my paintings are work-friendly. This one, arguably, is not.

By the way, the colors did not translate very well to digital. Especially the blue. It's less electric in real life.

It's done! I think it's my favorite so far.

Nordic Landscape
Acrylic on 18" x 18" stretched canvas

I didn't do much:

• The parallelogram 'rough spot' area is now connected to the rest of the scene. It was clear to me that it should stretch all the way across. The path then guides the viewer to it.
  
• I outlined the mountain peaks with some soft gray then chunky light blue, which really makes them pop.
• I added a little thickness to the clouds.

That's it!

I didn't have anything planned for Monday's class, so I went down to the student lounge, hopped on one of the old iMacs and Googled for 'nordic landscape'. I picked this photo as my inspiration. However, the student lounge printer costs money, so I made a quick chalk sketch of the composition on crunchy brown art paper and figured that I could just get the rest from memory. I'm not shooting for realism, so there's really no need to work from a photo anyway.

Here's my painting:

Nordic Landscape (unfinished)
Acrylic on 18" x 18" stretched canvas

Let's talk more about it:

I like:

• The luminous green area.
• The 'rough spot' in the lower left corner. I originally used the pallete knife, but didn't like the result, so painted over most of it. But I left a little patch for fun.
• The fried egg clouds.
• The crazy colored mountains.

I need to work on:

• The transistion between the mountains and the sky.
• The brown parallelogram area in the center. One of the things that attracted me to the photo was the well-defined parallelogram shadow area. But I fell into the trap of wanting another 'rough spot' and chose to transform this shadow into who knows what.
• I may want to add some sort of feature of interest to the green area. The photo has a building, but I'm not sure I want that here.
• The sky. It might need a little more life.
  

To sum it up - I like it but it's not done yet.