Girl reading on the beach - oil painting by Stephen Scott

Girl Reading on the beach - Pletenberg bay
Oil on Board
20cm x 25cm

Pletenberg bay is a wonderful beach destination, during the holiday season thousands of people flock to the water's edge. We were there in March last year, during the off season.
On the beach only a handful of people swam, and relaxed on the sand. The day was hot and the sea refreshingly cold.

Later in the afternoon storm clouds built up sending a cool mist ahead of the rain. The beach was deserted by the time we'd packed up our bags and folded up our chairs and umbrellas.

How to buy this painting: How to buy a painting

Google BUZZ

I feel like I'm on the cutting edge of a new fad - Google Buzz.

It took me years to sign up with gmail and much longer to get facebook and twitter accounts... but here I am in the first week of the Google Buzz launch!

I feel so proud of myself.

Cycling and painting for charity

Two years ago I joined a bunch of crazy cyclists to raise money for a charity The Chaeli Campaign.

This year I'm doing the ride again.

We're starting in Hermanus on 12 March and cycling through to Stellenbosch, the next day (Saturday) we cycle to Cape Town. On Sunday we join the Argus Cycle tour for the last 109Km. In total we'll cover over 300km over the three days.

The Argus tour is the largest cycling event in the South African cycling calendar. There's starting group that is entirely dedicated to Charity. In this group there are a combination of celebrities and people like me who have the intent of raising money for a good cause.

The celebrities in this group include (and have included) people like Lance Armstrong (the intrepid 7 times winner of the Tour de France), Lucas Redebe (South African born soccer star), Francious Pinaar (Captain of the 1995 World Cup winning rugby team), Springbok Rugby player Bob Skinstad and the beautiful tennis player Gabriella Sabatini.

	Some of the 2010 charity group riders

There are two ways you can support the charity, One by donating directly or Secondly - Buy a painting. A portion (25%) of every painting sold is going to be donated to The Chaeli Campaign till the end of March (Argus month.)

Daniel Scocco's free blogging tips

The main goal of my blog is to promote my art work with the intention of generating sales, which in turn enables me to afford to paint more.... the cycle of art life.

Here's the problem I'm having:

About three in a hundred visitors to this blog will click through to the sales page, of that about 1 in a hundred will buy a painting... (about 1 sale for every thousand views)

The maths seems simple enough: to increase sales all I got to do is increase the number of visitors to my blog... but how?

One of my biggest failures with this blog has been my inability to generate the web traffic (number of visits) that is needed to be able to realise the sales - I'm an artist after all, not a web marketing guru.

I've been scouring the internet trying to understand this internet business, then I stumbled on Daniel Scocco's free eBook on how to make money through blogging. His book is not a perfect fit for an art blog, but it's been incredibly helpful in understanding the current personality of blogging and the internet.

If you intend taking your blog to a new level; go get the book here: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/make-money-blogging/

The sleeping coach

The sleeping coach

Felt tipped pen on paper

As I've mentioned before, there are three main things people do on the train; sleep, read and text.

These two were complete strangers in that they did not know each other, and yet they were a perfect match in habit - within minutes of sitting down both their heads were nodding and snoring in unison.

How to buy this painting: How to buy a painting

Westcoast silos - a revision

Oil on Board

20 cm x 15 cm

I've posted this painting before (here) but as it's been standing on my shelf I've had this feeling that I need to do something to fix it... and I did...

See if you can spot the difference.


How to buy this painting: How to buy a painting

Floppy hat and sun dress

Oil on Board
15cm x 20cm

This is a frivolous painting, it borders on sentimental, but I love it! It was fun to paint, it's bright and it just.... well it's just fun.

There's no back story, I saw an image like this somewhere and used the idea; I almost feel like I've cheated beacause there was no back breaking effort to get the reference image...but I don't care.

Enjoy it!

How to buy this painting: How to buy a painting

Journal of a painting I - Coffee on a winter's beach

This post is aimed at the budding artist and anyone that's interested in the process of creating art.

I've been asked about the method behind the painting, so here's step one to how I go about completing a painting, so here's step one in a short painting tutorial - a basic "method of painting."

The start:
It is very seldom that I start a painting without a planing phase - I've taken to doing my composition sketches in pen. You can see that the sketch is kept loose with no attempt at detail.

Composition sketch - Coffee on a winter's beach
Felt tipped pen on paper

The Composition:
The frame around the sketch was added afterwords while I was deciding on the composition.
There are a couple of pencil lines that I added afterwords as markers while I transferred the sketch to the canvas.
First are the diagonal lines that cross through the center of the figure - the center of the drawing gives me a coordinate that I can easily mark off on the canvas.
Also you can see how the one diagonal flows along the slant of the figure - it's pleasing to the eye.

There are two vertical lines - these are in the third positions (if you divide the width into three you'd get these positions)
There's a rule of thirds in composition which recommends that key points in your composition should be on the third lines - in this case the knees and the body are on the thirds.

The horizontal line breaks the rule of thirds - its the halfway mark for the vertical. I'm not sure if I'm breaking rules here, but it works. The main part of the figure is central.

Once I've made these line I make the same markings on the canvas, then I fill in the picture using these reference points as markers - it becomes a join the dots exercise.

Here's the painted sketch before the block in begins:

Painted sketch - Coffee on a winter's beach
painted with a thinned solution of turps and burnt sienna

As you can see, the initial painted sketch is even rougher than the pen sketch. (Also you'll see that I missed the third position for the knees - I'll end up paying for that mistake later on...)

In the next post I'll show you the block in phase.