City of Refuge View

We painted at the City of Refuge Friday, also known as Puuhonau O Honauau National Historical Park. There are numerous ancient rock walls and old settlement remains on a trail in the park. Here is a view across the bay at the park. Surf always seems to pick up as we paint so I added the waves against the  rocks.

Ho'okena Beach painting

We painted south of Kona Friday, at Ho'okena Beach, where I'd never been before. There were dramatic cliffs in the distance so I figured I'd go full acid color. LOL. Limited my palette a little, to 8 colors, and yet produced one of my most colorful scenes. Tried 3 colors last week but blue, orange, and white don't produce any greens so didn't work well to paint trees here in Hawaii. Here I used 2 blues (phthalo and ultramarine), yellow, red, purple, orange, burnt umber for a dark, and white.

    

New work in various media

Have been doing my regular oil painting but wanted to shake things up a little. Did a limited palette study using only orange, blue, and white outdoors Friday, but no way to make any green colors so the trees came out like fall colors which don't fit here in Hawaii. Decided to go over the work with wax or encaustic with a stylus which I had done in the past. The result is below: 

   

I also wanted to try some acrylics which I had but didn't use for a while either. In my many years of painting I've used almost every media before settling on oils but do like the fast drying of acrylics, especially here in Hawaii where they paint dries in minutes. I used an image I had of the Holei Sea Arch here on the Big Island. I like the contrast as the acrylics dries darker but you have to be careful not to make the whole image too dark.