 God's beauty is all around us and my goal as an artist is to capture and interpret that beauty on canvas and to take you the viewer along with me on this painting journey. And welcome to painting journeys. Once again we're here together and I last time I did a painting in our last show that was of coming home and this is the what the painting what I worked from. It's a view from my living room window and it epitomizes everything about coming home to me especially during the holiday season. And then when we were finished with the show this is how far I had come with the painting and as you can see it's pretty pretty rough. There was quite a bit of finished work to do on the painting when I got home but to my home studio. But I did and this is the finished painting. And as you can see I have brightened up some areas and made more branches and there's light on this tree here. And if you look carefully you can see just a little bit of warmth on this tree. This tree is really more in front and then as the tree turns it becomes cooler the snow and then this flash of color. I put that on with my palette knife and that was so exciting that's so much fun. So this is what coming home looks like to me. I'm very pleased with the way it turned out and I hope you like it too. Now today I have a really special treat for you. We are going to take a journey to Ireland and we're going to be painting a castle. A castle that was probably built in the I would say probably the 13th or 14th century. It originally belonged to the Old Donald clan in Ireland and they had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres of land. The castle the English came in in the 1600s and they took over the castle and they took over the lands and the castle kind of went downhill from there. I guess it did have some owners but anyway some years ago quite a few a young man by the name of Sean Riley purchased the castle very reasonably and he decided that he's going to restore the castle to his former glory. Well and if you look real close you can see he lives there and you can see a little bit of his living room there behind him. He is really quite the character Sean is and this is a picture of what the more of the castle looks like. It's really very very dilapidated you know there's just a small portion of it that is livable where he's living you know. So we went there one day and we had the most exciting time. The Leap Castle is it's located near the town of Burr if you've ever been to Ireland and that's at the base of the the sleeve bloom mountains and it was just the whole area. I could stand in the window up here and look out of that window and see for miles all this gorgeous Irish countryside you know with a little patches of the different colors of green and everything. They say that Ireland is like every green that you can imagine you know and it is it is. I guess that's why John Wayne actually went over there and filmed a couple of his movies there. Anyway so I think we better get started on this. As you can see I've done a rough sketch now I can't get this whole the whole photo into the painting so I decided to eliminate and do what was the most important part to me and to me the most important part is this area right in here and if you can look very carefully through here this is actually an opening in this wall this outer wall and you can see inside this courtyard this inside of here there's actually trees it's not a courtyard it was it's just the roof has come off of that area and the trees have actually there's actually trees growing right out of the rooms of these of the castle is it's it's really something to see. First of all I'm going to take and I'm going to wipe some of this charcoal off. I put the charcoal on and then I have fixed it with some water so I would have my drawing there but I want to wipe the excess off excuse the noises. I just want to just see the drawing there okay the basic shapes there okay I thought this was just so unique and I I think I would really like to try working with my palette knife a lot on this one it just kind of seems to me all this the stone and everything would really lend itself to some palette knife work on it so first of all we'll get the palette and as always I'm just working with a limited palette of warm and warm down the one side and cool coming across the bottom colors and first of all I think I'll go ahead and get that sky in there that sky is such a gorgeous gorgeous blue. Let me mix up some some blues here and we have those clouds too that are very beautiful. The afternoon that we went to this gentleman's castle and he was there talking with us he when we walked into the main room there there was this huge table it must have been at least 14 16 feet long and he had fixed us lunch and the food it was an Irish stew and it had lots of things in it that I couldn't recognize if you know what I mean it but it was delicious it was absolutely delicious and he had made some homemade Irish soda bread and I never did see the kitchen so I don't know the conditions that this food was cooked in but I didn't ask either because I was hungry anyway it was was marvelous and we all sat around this great big long table and he had this chair where he could just kind of sit there and watch us very quiet gentlemen very very quiet too bright you see when you want to make sure that you are in the right color family or the right color temperature you mix and then you hold the knife up to what you're working from you have to always keep in mind of course that it is a photograph it is printers ink that you're painting from so you take the liberty of making whatever just adjustments you feel are necessary all right I'm going to put the sky in with my brush and I do see right down in here I do see a little bit where the cloud is right in here and then I see cloud right up in this area here anyway so there we all are sitting around this marvelous repast and he's just sort of sitting there looking at us and then we finished our meal and he came around to each one of us and he gave us a little tiny I'm not sure what it was called it was about the shape of a shot glass but it was made out of ceramic it looked very old fashion very you know had like hadn't hand thrown on a kiln and very rough very rough looking and then he came around with this bottle and he gave us all like maybe hmm maybe a finger and a half of this liquid okay well what that liquid was called is pochin and pochin is Irish moonshine this fellow makes Irish moonshine and he serves it to his guests there at the castle and I guess no one ever has turned him in for it because they all enjoy the moonshine you know or the pochin so anyway he served us that well I'll tell you just a little tiny bit about went to my head immediately and I was trying to find where the restroom was and I asked and he said oh just go up those stairs over there and you'll you'll see it is like the third or fourth door on the on the left well the stairs were circular okay and it was a little stone stairwell that was perhaps maybe a foot and a half wide very tiny I think people back in the early times were smaller and so this was really quite quite small little stairwell that I was going up and I kept going around and around and all the doors that I would come to were real tiny like this little arch here they were real tiny and they only came up to about here on me you know and I would think to myself oh gosh that can't be in the bathroom I'll have to you know be all doubled over and crawl I don't even know if I can fit through this little tiny door and as we're going all the way up here's all these little doorways and little arches so I get all the way to the top I don't see the door that's supposed to be for the bathroom I don't see it somehow or another because my head was swimming from the pochin I had missed that particular door and so I get all the way to the top and I open this door and it was like opening a door into the inner sanctum it was so dark and so empty and such a feeling of void that I felt like I could just be it was like a horror movie I felt like I could just be sucked right into this room it was very very frightening and I got scared and so I'm sitting down at the top of the stairs and I say in this real weak voice could somebody come and help me because I thought I was lost you know and so he sent a gentleman up that had been there before that knew where the bathroom was to show me so it was it was an experience it was an experience this is what I'm trying to get across to you it was like nothing I had ever been to before and but he was so gracious so anyway then we came down when it came back down from the bathroom he pulled out his flute and he began to play his flute for us and it was just beautiful I mean it was it was so lulling and just it was marvelous what he was doing with this flute I love the Irish flute anyway and he was a master at it so then after we were all done eating and we'd had our poaching and we're all sitting there kind of half days he began to tell us his story about the castle and what he was trying to do with it and he told us that you know we asked him well do you do you live here do you are you married and he said yes I'm married and I have a daughter and she is a champion Irish dancer she's won many many awards across she's even danced in the United States and all over the world and she's won many awards but she and my wife is a retired Irish dancer and I never knew this before but it does make a lot of sense Irish dancers are never very old because it damages their their muscles and their bones so much the dance is so vigorous and so at a certain point in their life they have to just kind of give up on it but his daughter so he took us upstairs to his living quarters and the they had like an old cast iron bathtub and it was just you know it was like I don't know there was no pretense it was just like they had just stepped out of the bath and left their towels on the floor I mean there was absolutely no pretense it was just marvelous to seeing what their life was really like and he showed us his daughter's costumes and they were glorious you know and then we got to explore a little on our own and one of the things that I really liked the best was going to these windows there were so many windows everywhere and you could climb up into these areas and you could look out the window and the window would frame this beautiful pastoral scene that was a lot of fun that that was that was a trip that was a marvelous marvelous trip and in the weeks or in the shows to come we're going to be seeing a little more of Ireland I have so many stories to tell you about my journey over there that it was just oh it was so marvelous I'm just kind of softening that down because I want that to recede and so if I soften it a little bit and make sure that all my strokes are going in a downward motion then if I go across the light will reflect on it and it'll reflect up instead of looking like it's going down and behind so I always kind of smooth the sky in a downward motion that's why I'm doing that there now I kind of like that the clouds could be a little a little bit more pronounced but I don't want to get into that too much because I'm going to get all hung up on this sky and you're going to say well kitty when are you going to start that building that castle I do want to put a little bit more in here though why this paint love that old thick juicy paint it's just the best to work with all right there we go all right now I do see a little bit of that blue sky right here you see it and there's a little touch right here where that's open and those trees are going through and I believe that that would be let's see this window this window and that would be this window right and there's a little touch of blue sky in there and then there's a little touch of blue sky that's coming like this and like this okay and that looks like it's a little dark a little bit too much so we'll just come back in with a little bit of light and lighten that up just a little bit and now then I'm going to I want to get a nice dark on here so I'm going to mix up a nice dark and I always like to put a little bit of alizarin crimson into my dark I don't like to just make it black black is so flat looking and dead I like to put a little alizarin crimson in the dark and it makes it gives it more life that way and I'm going to I'm just going to come in here and get this little bit of dark in here so that we can see what that looks like maybe I'll add a little bit more red to it there we go and then over here we have some darks we have some darks in this window here you know one of the things that really amazed me about this castle is it though you could actually go to the window and sit on the window ledge because the castle walls were three feet at least three feet wide so there would be this big ledge three feet of ledge that you could sit on sit in the window and look out down below it's amazing there are all sorts of places where people could look out to make sure that you know the the marauders were not coming to get them but evidently that didn't work because the English did a pretty good job on the O'Donnells on the O'Donnell clan this gentleman had the cutest little car a little European like car was real real tiny he took off for a while while over there and I don't know if he went to the store or what but anyway out came this little tiny car that looked like a little well we have them now over here little cars that look like their toys our little electric cars not all of them look that way but some of them do his was very tiny he worked he worked in the pubs played music followed his daughter around with her dancing okay we've got another window over here that we have where we have some dark we'll go ahead and put that in so now we can kind of see okay we've got the lightest light and the darkest dark on here we can kind of see where we're going with this okay alright so now then make up some paint here for the side of this and this I think I'm for the time being I'm just going to put on with the knife and I'm not going to worry about the detail of all the stones and everything because that's that's not that's finished work that's what happens when I take the painting back to my studio in my home and I work on it for now we're just going to try to get something on there that so we have a base that looks pretty good okay so we hit right in here we have a sharp whoops sharp corner right there you see that right there and that's because there's all kinds of plants and things coming in there and there's a lot of plants and things coming up here so I'm just gonna kind of put this on like this I really have that thick don't I wow oh well that's called impasto when you paint really thick and it's fun it's like frosting a cake I'm over here around here and then we're going to and over to here you see this is I'm leaving because it's it's where my to show the depth of the wall there when I come back in here you know I'll come back in with a little bit of gray and blue and put some you know different things on here to kind of make it look more like even just patting the knife on makes a nice rock look but like I said that's detail I don't want to get into that right now people in Ireland are so friendly and it's just amazing how warm and friendly they are how everybody has a story and I'll tell you they think nothing of coming up and smacking you right on the took us they'll go walking by and if they like the way they that you look well I just might smack you on the took us I found that a little difficult I had I was in a coffee shop with some girls and we were sitting there and this little gentleman all maybe ten inches shorter than I am came up and sat down he was older he was probably my age or whatever and came up and he said you're a fair lassie can I buy you a drink of course I can't talk in that accent but and when he opened his mouth to smile his teeth are all gone you know so anyway it was just I mean I don't know maybe lots of the gals over there letting buy them drinks I don't know but I didn't really want one but I don't think a girl would have much trouble getting a date over there all right put this here and I'm gonna come back with the brush and come dark and a little bit of this so that it looks like it's a little more in shadow and darker yet now this I have to be a little careful with you know I know there's little stones there and everything but I can't really put those in just yet because that's detail and right so right now I'm just trying to you know get my values laid on and the feel of the place all that finish stuff will come later the next time you see it and you'll have to be sure and catch the next show so that you can see how this turns out all right now this is all green in here so I am going to make it nice and dark the the darker green is a cooler green okay what's in the center there is cooler so I'm going to mask this in right in here with this darker green and there again as I was saying all I'm doing is I'm going for shape for the shape and value on the painting detail detail and the actual finer points of the painting will be seen when you see it at our next show it's completed so this is this is to represent this little bit of of greenery that we have in here excuse me I'm softening the edges okay we have a lot of dark right in here very very dark I in fact I think I'm going to just go right with the blue and put that in there because I want that to be really super dark so that when I put the lights on it it's going to show up really good and so by putting this that greenery excuse me frog at my throat here that greenery is very very dark let me see before I do anything more on that green I'm going to need to get some of the building behind it now this is kind of got an interesting a very interesting shape and I don't know if you remember at the beginning of the show when I when I showed you the the outside of part of the castle there you could see the that archway from the well there's many archways like that but you could see that in the other photograph so I'm gonna put that back there and there's there's little there's little there again there's little detail in that that we're not going to worry about now we're going to go back to the knife mix a bunch more paint here see and see you know what another good really good thing to do is to try to echo the color that you're working with into your painting all over so I'm actually taking the sky color and mixing it into the orange to make kind of a gray and so I therefore I'm keeping my colors very harmonious because I'm repeating color and that's if you want a nice harmonious painting that's very important okay I'm liking this it it kind of looks like a little bit like mud but then I think that's kind of what they put the castle together with this mud all right I think I've already got a pretty good pile here okay so we've got a little a little thing up there and then it comes down here and it's coming across here oh that color come out and that goes up there and then we have little things here almost like little turrets you know one of the things that was really so interesting about being in Ireland was all of the you would go along and there would be just a round lookout and they would usually be higher on the hill and these would be on the outskirts of the of the land of the castles and and they would be there so that somebody could watch to make sure that they weren't being invaded and they would they would watch from these little round turrets I would imagine that many a person fell asleep to the detriment of the castle owner that's a little darker back there because that's you see that's going away now I know in the photograph that it looks like it's really an extreme angle but if I was standing here looking at this castle it would not be that extreme photography is very difficult to paint from versus painting from life because in photography it just the photography distorts the subject matter so you have to know how that a distort distortion is going to show up and make the make the allowances for it you don't because if you just do it like what you're seeing in the photograph it most likely is is not going to be correct and that's pretty important when you're painting from photographs being a primarily a studio painter myself I do a lot of work from photographs and so I'm always watching out for those little traps that you know show the world that that you did not really see the place that you just copying photographs and that's something else you don't want to do is just copy you want to create this is your chance to create when you paint and that's what you want to do so if it doesn't look exactly like the photograph that's good you know it really if somebody comes up to you and says oh I love that it looks just like a photograph that's not really a compliment because all that means is that you've captured the the look of a photograph it doesn't mean that you put your soul into it your heart and your soul into the painting by making little changes and putting parts of yourself into it it looks really rugged and rough to you I know that I know you're probably at home scratching your head right now thinking gosh is this girl even know what she's doing we will see we will see okay now I'm going to come with a little green and there's a little bit of green right in here that I'm going to put on there a little bit of a plant and I'm just going to pat it on kind of and so that you can kind of get the idea of what that's going to look like when I'm done I may scrape that off when I get it back to the to my home studio but for now I'll leave it on there just so that you can see and I'll cover up my little bit of sky hole and I left there that too much that's okay there we go and I will take this and go across the top and then it will be shaped a little better and we're going to be in in Ireland for several several shows now I have some marvelous experiences that I want to tell you about and in places that I want to show you and very funny incidents that happened to me while I was there there's nothing quite like being in another country and just kind of have to go with the flow and sometimes you don't really know what the flow is to go with so it can be a little intimidating at times there we go that looks a little better there okay so now then I'm seeing this is being a little bit yellow or up here I'm gonna add a little yellow to this side here because this is cooler that's a cooler temperature because it's going away from us and it's in shadow and this is kind of brighter so we do have this little thing that comes up here and then this comes across here and it comes over to right about here and then it comes up again right there and so this is in here there's that corner let me see here this looks like it has a little bit of pink in it that's pretty I hope I'm not copying the printer's ink but why not though would be pretty against all that green why not take that liberty yeah that's just a little bit wider right there and it comes right there like that we go isn't this fun I love it I love to paint I love it that I'm able to be here with with you today as I share my my journey with you to to Ireland and to the other places that that will be going in future shows okay and this is just going to kind of come over here and you know when I step back and I look at that I think that's got a pretty good thing going pretty happy with it oh this is more green over here and let's see and I just got a signal from the cameraman that I'm running out of time I'm so sorry we don't have too long left to be together today well I get the whole thing with paint on it I hope to see now this is kind of a green down here because this is plants in here coming up so let's just kind of get that in there this is dark right in here inside this window there's so much greenery growing over this it was just amazing I mean there was whole places that were missing and that were just all overgrown and there's something in Ireland it's a yellow plant and you see it everywhere it's called gorse and it just as you're driving along and you see it along the countryside it's beautiful I mean I thought it was just beautiful it's great big huge bushes of this of this stuff called gorse gorse g-o-r-s-c and we just I thought it was just beautiful but the people that live there they hate it because it's invasive and then takes their over their their crops and they have to fight with it all the time the sheep and the cattle are constantly battling you know for for food because of this these the gorse and the gorse is is very thorny so you can't even get near it you know it's very very thorny very like this and this is going to come out like this and it's going to be a little bit darker right in there that corner is and that's going to go like that and I'll lighten that up just a wee bit okay and then on top of this is more green right that's coming up right in here and that's that dark that dark green again it is coming all the way down in here and then we have some of the yellow green to put some of that on there too and underneath there we have the the yellow there's a little yellow right there and there's a little yellow right here over here I may have to fix that later there we go holding my knife you probably think oh my goodness kitty stop mumbling mumbling to yourself girl I forget I forget that I'm on camera just talking away here put this in here like so and we'll have some of this behind okay and we just have this little bit here and wonder if we can get this all covered with paint before the end of the show wouldn't it be lovely I would be very happy with that if I could accomplish that for you I hate to go back with a leave the show with just a partial painting and I love all those colors or the yummy when they come out and then we're going to have to have some dark in here for the window the and the window ledge here that's going to have to be dark too yep oh I like that blue in there see how pretty that made that a little bit of that up here too yeah oh I like that that's pretty straighten this up a little bit and try to straighten that one up a little bit now we'll come from the outside and we'll straighten this up right here and right here and then this is under all righty and I oh I just noticed kitty those windows are going on a downward slant so I have to fix that there we go oh boy I guess you know you really get the feeling of or I do anyway when I look at this I really get the feeling of how I felt when I was there it was like I had stepped back hundreds of years was to meaty evil times and what I when I was on that dark stairwell you know was I going to be trapped in the castle you know I have an active imagination but it was it was kind of a wild you know wild experience I think the poaching had a lot to do with it that poaching was something else and bird oh my gosh the poaching learned like fire but of course I always did I mean I didn't complain I asked for another one but he poured the second one even lighter because he didn't I think he realized I couldn't handle it too well if I couldn't find the bathroom there we go but see in Ireland you just have fun you let your hair down and you just have fun and you do whatever you want you know who's to know what those crazy toothless Irishman now that was me and Kenny why did you say that okay so now then we're gonna take a little more green and we're gonna put right in here I'm just gonna kind of splash it on because I want you to remember that we got all this green in here and plants and all that business on there and the only thing I haven't done is I haven't shown you those trees that are coming from the one these these plants over here a brighter yellow green right in there I haven't shown you those trees are growing right out of the middle of the room here okay that's gonna be just a little bit brighter you know I might not do too much to this I'm kind of excited with the way it looks right now you know it's it to me it looks it looks just oh I just got the message I have less than five minutes left kids and I wanted so badly to just show you those trees coming out of the top let me see if I can get those in real fast bear with me they probably won't look the greatest but at least we'll get an idea of what they look like this tree is actually growing out of here too big a brush so once again we have been visiting Leap Castle at the foot of the sleeve bloom mountains near the city of Burr Ireland today and it's the original home of the O'Donnell clan and it's being refurbished and rebuilt by a gentleman named Sean Riley who does a little flu playing and makes a little moonshine and this generally has a very nice life there we go so now we can see that the tree is growing out of there I'll put more branches on it and everything I just wanted I wanted you to be able to see you know what that was gonna look like and I'll have to thin those down and everything and there as darker that's a darker edge there and that's darker right there okay what do you think huh I think that it looks pretty darn good and I think I am pretty happy with it I'm just gonna make a little bit more yellow green right in here so that you can see that these things are growing down and there we go there is a portion a tiny portion of Leap Castle I want to thank you so much for joining me today on painting journeys as we've journeyed across the canvas and and you listen to my silly stories about my trip to Ireland I appreciate it so much and I do hope you'll catch us then on our next show when you'll see this completed once again this is Kitty Lynn Klisch with painting journeys be sure and catch us next time see you then bye bye for now