Mansion at Brand Park

I liked this house a lot. It looked like Mexican Architecture to me. The house was located right at the corner of Brand Park. There was a little hill behind it.

Pastel color 2

Parking lot is a great place to paint because you have both a great city view and privacy. I can paint from my car sometimes. This time, I started off painting thumbnails to warm up. Light direction is very important to understand my subject matter and to see it in dramatic way.

Pastel color

I wanted to use pastel color when I was painting at Eaton Canyon Park. Learning how to use Pastel colors helps me get a quick impression of a complicated scene like this.

Sunset

When I am painting sunset, the use of color relationship becomes a key factor. Since the light was so strong, I started to see all sort of colors. So I closed my eyes for 30 seconds and decided to paint the frist color I saw. It was red which was not so surprising. Another challege to paint sunset is that the colors only last for 10 mins:(

Thanksgiving holiday

The house was on Ocean Front Walk in Venice, CA. This house stands wild and moody among the sexy contemporary neighbors. There was a beach house designed by Frank Gehry a few house away. It was foggy and cold as you might feel from the painting.

My friend, Minoru, painting in my apartment's courtyard. The light was coming from the left. The challenge was to break all the elements into fore ground, mid ground, and background.

The red sunset was hitting the Marriott hotel in Burbank, then it disappeared as I painted. I was sitting at the Fry's parking lot, and the train rail was right in front of me. The coolest color was on the mountain.

Street Painting

First three images was done in Glendale. I just realized that you can see the mountain from almost any part of the city. The last image was done at Hancock Park next to LACMA. It was done when the city were building The Broad Contemporary Art Museum(BCAM).

Castaic Lake

This is a painting I did at Castaic lake. There was a dam that divided the lake into the upper lake and the lower lake. People can do fishing at the lower portion and yacht sailing at the upper portion.

Trip to Santa Barbara

Chet, Marco, Felix, Frans, and I went out to Santa Barbara, and we did some paintings there. This was long time ago. It was really fun. I was so happy with the paintings that I gave them to my family in Japan. I was mostly paying attention to the composition and movement of the brush strokes.