Egg shell and bowl

This is an interesting setup. I had fun to render the colors and shapes of the egg shells and the white bowl. Hope you like it too.

Lemon on the tin

I painted this still life painting to capture the essence of the metalic jar and the lemon reflection on the metal. It was a fun experience to show the strong contrast on the smooth surface.

Climbing Roses

I love roses and I always wanted to paint roses. This is my first rose painting and I enjoyed painting it very much. The scenary is the climbing roses in the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden under the afternoon sun. I hope you like it.

Point Lobos

The stunning Point Lobos is my favorite place to visit - The gigantic waves pounding the rocks was quite dramatic! This is a small study (9x12), but someday I will try to paint a big one and see if I can create a more stunning effect in bigger canvas.

View

This is a beautiful view of a Provence field, with its signature colors of violet, gold, and green. I had some challenges while painting the shapes, distance, and colors, but enjoy the results of the finished painting.

Out in the field

I totally immersed myself into this beautiful warm field mixed with gold, lavender, and fresh green colors.

Gate

I have fun printing this one from the picture taken by a friend of mine when she visited Provence a year ago.

Provence, Frence

Hope I have captured serene moment of this beautiful French town.

Arastradero Park

I have fun painting the Arastradero Park under the afternoon sun.

Half Moon Bay

We went to Half Moon Bay to paint seacape, instead we bumped into this beautiful and tranquil mustard field. It is absolutely a paradise.

Calla Lilies

In this early spring, painting calla lilies seems like a sure thing. They are simple and elegant, very nice to paint.

Pears

the beautiful pears and the pitcher created a very warm and cozy setting.

Plein air - Baylands

I decided to paint the Baylands scene today. It is a very refreshing and exciting feeling, afterward I still love painting the plein air. It's been a while since I last visited Baylands, but I still have a vivid memory of what that beautiful place is.

White porcelain jar

I studied this simple but elegant setup. The idea is to paint the white porcelin jar as the focal point, and the big dark vase as the support. The challenge is to paint the right values of everything together, including the beautiful yellow fabric wrapped around them.

3rd lesson

3rd class with Fongwei. This time is the study of focus point (lemon vs. plum flowers), and dark backfround with dark vase.

2nd lesson

2nd class with Fongwei, very challenging. Fongwei asked me to focued on the dark, grey, and light values, and paid attention to my drawing.

First lesson

I had my first class with Fongwei last night. He explained to me the 3 value fundamental: dark, middle, and light values. He also showed me how artists arrange the 3 values in their paintings to make the paintings more interesting. Since it was only him and me, we painted together. It was a very valuable experience as I could see how he worked on each subject as well as overall on the painting. I learned a lot.

New teacher

I got to call Fongwei Liu today and asked him to teach me. This is great!
I will be meeting him tomorrow night to discuss what to do next.

Back home

I'm back home from 3-day intensive learning and painting at Qiang Huang's workshop. I'm tired physiclly but energetic mentally. I visited Fongwei Liu's blog and saw those beautiful paintings he painted there, I'm totally immersed into his art. Great artist!

2nd day at Qiang Huang's workshop

It's much better today. First of all, we don't need to worry about the parking. I packed my lunch so that saved me some time too. Qiang demostrated roses and that was absolutely beautiful. I did some value study first before I started the painting. It's a good strategy and the final painting is more predictable. Now I saw how Qiang painted the roses, I'll need to paint more roses for better results. Qiang's presentation in the morning was another knock out. I totally enjoy it.

First day at Qiang Huang's workshop

I am exhausted! Qiang did a great presentation about the composition, he used the paintings of David Laffel and Sherrie McGraw to explain how these masters convey the ideas to the audience, light direction, speed, rhythms, and subject matter,.... it was absolutely great. And his demo was wonderful too. Just like the rest of his paintings, the demo painting was simple, elegant, and distinctive.
But I didn't painted well, I felt like I was putting too much pressure on myself, plus the distractions on the scene (video taping, parking ticket, too many participants, setting up the still life, etc.). Tomorrow I'll have to focus on the painting and ignore the rest of the distraction.

Ready to Sacramento

I'm ready to take off to Sacramento for Qiang Huang's workshop. Very excited!
I didn't paint anything last night because I was loading up the "stuff" for the workshop, but here is the copy of Huang's pears. It was done quickly without many details and I found that pears are harder to paint than apples, as people said.

Orange

Last night I did a quick study of the orange, which is one of my favorite paintings from Qiang Huang.

Still life study

Over the weekend I did another still life study from Qiang's painting (oil: right, pastel: left). Tried to learn his style as much as I can before the workshop in this weekend.

Rose

I painted the rose from Qiang's blog. It turned out pretty nice and it's not that hard to paint roses.

Qiang Huang: still life study 2

A stormy day, can't do anything but paint in my garage. Painted the oil of Qiang's still life (left), compare with the pastel did in Sharon's house the past Sunday(lower).

Qiang Huang: still life study 1

I painted the oil of Qiang Huang's still life. Very lovely (left). It seems easy after all the pastel practice at Sharon's house (lover right). Or it's easier to copy, by nature :) The point is to learn from copying Qiang's painting and hope I can carry his style to my own paintings eventually.

Juried in FALC

Yesterday I found out from my email that the Fine Art League of Cupertino has juried me into the league. This is encouraging, it means the 3 oil paintings I did in Nov and Dec are "something" :)
At night I sent out the entry form for the league's member show "From the Heart" at the Main Street Cafe, Los Altos in February. This will be my first art show, display my work in the public place. How exciting!!!