Erma gorge

My internet connection lately has been so bad, I cannot even access some blogs and can hardly open others. At least I can still view and post on mine.

This is a view of the gorge of the small Erma river, located about an hour drive west of Sofia. It was a lovely trip to a picturesque site.

Sketches from Sofia

A couple of small sketches from Sofia - the Bulgarian capital. These may be the base for larger pieces later on.

The gilded domes of the cathedral church Alexander Nevski

Sofia University

A few sketches

(once again, a post that disappeared somewhere in google's "cloud" some time ago... )

A few sketches I did on the go. Still having hard time getting used to the sketch-book paper and pan colors..

Bruges

Based on a photo from a Benelux tour a few years ago. Going through the photos now, I'm thinking that Bruges is a perfect place for painting outdoors. If only I painted back then....
One of my goals with this view was to avoid fussy details, like the ones on the Elora painting in my previous post. So I did a pencil sketch, then a quick watercolor sketch. By the time I started the actual picture I knew the major shapes and had gone through filtering out the unimportant details. Funny how hard it is to make it simple!

Meeting room sketches

Elora

Elora is a picturesque small town in southern Ontario, about an hour drive from Toronto. It has some original stone buildings preserved from the 1800s, which give the town a unique character. From here one can take a few hour walk along the Elora Gorge on the Grand river.

Sunny

I think this is not too bad for a very first attempt at painting a portrait. Sunny is special to me not only because he is my mother's dog, but also as the son of a dog I had. Don't be fooled by the wise expression on his face. The reference photo was taken while he was extremely concentrated monitoring the trajectory of our every bite at an outdoor patio. 
I have been making sketches of him lately, but didn't dare painting him. Then today I saw this posting on Konstantin Sterkhov's blog, and thought that I could try my luck...

Canadian sunsets

Arches, 38 x 28 cm

Arches, 38 x 28 cm

It has been a busy and quite exhausting week for me, so I needed to get back to painting with something fun. What can be more rewarding than doing sunsets wet-in-wet. So I dug out a few reference photos on the subject...

The first one above is a scene from the west coast that I painted years ago, only now I did it in a larger size and with good materials. The second, of the Great Lakes area... well, I had too much colors left on the palette from the first sunset.

White Freesia

 This is the corrected version with darkened background, which I think I like better (published on April 12 at 20:10 EST)

I am not particularly happy with this one. I wish I had left more white paper and made the background darker....

Iris again

Still very intrigued by the beauty of the shapes and patterns that nature created in this flower...