Thank you very much for the kind words! It's really nice to hear them!
I enjoy seeing the paintings every day. That keeps them on my mind. I use oil paints. Over the years I have changed the styles now and then. Always oil paint though. My favorite now is painting on linen. I guess I have been doing that for a few years. Sometimes canvas though.
Lots of times I take a snowcat and place it in a different background. And then I alter that too sometimes. I keep trying to get good colors. Lately I'm trying to mix new colors (actually very old colors from different architectural palettes from around the world). I'm trying to tune the tonal values together too. I mean I'm trying to keep darks and lights that aren't too extreme. That seems to me to be a little more harmonious. Lots to learn. I experiment a lot.
Now that I think about it four to five years ago I was doing snowcat underpaintings using acrylic paints. I was doing layer paintings with transparent oils. I'd paint an acrylic scene (after I drew the snowcat using pencil). Then paint over the acrylic paint scene with oil paints until a pleasing color/value could be seen. You always had to let the oils dry though before adding the next layer.
The underpaintings were usually super bold versions of the colors or the complementary colors (opposite side of the color wheel from the surface colors). You can see this influence a little in the articles's Snow-Master painting that has the snowcat driving towards the viewer.
It was great fun doing the underpaintings! They went really fast with wild colors. Acrylics dry really quickly. So you paint for color not so much super edge accuracy. Although I sure tried to be exact. I photographed some of the underpaintings because they were so vivid. I didn't really think people would really take to that though. It was kind of thrilling to paint though. I eventually switched from layers though because the paintings took three times as long to finish.
Now I usually tone the linen with the complementary color of the dominant subject or background color.
Now I'm thinking maybe I can once again request some really good snowcat photos? I'm running out--or I can never have enough. Or if there are any really good landscape photos of snowy scenes? I'm really out of those photos! If anybody has any that they wouldn't mind me using maybe they can be e-mailed, PMed or something? Thanks for that!
And thank you both again for the wonderful words!