Two Quick Paintings

I dashed this one off quickly, yesterday. This tomato weighed in at 1 1/4 pounds. I haven't painted from life with a viewfinder recently, which made the viewfinder awkward to use.

#255 - Kellogg's Breakfast - 8" x 8" - paper

Originally, I took this morning off work, since I was going to go to the fair to sketch. Instead, I decided to stay at home for the entire day and catch up on a few things. That may sound like a crazy trade off, but I've been suffering from overdoing-it-itus and need to slow down. 

Since I haven't had much time to paint, I did another quick painting this morning. This was painted from a picture I took on my first outing to try plein air painting with Michele and Kat. I feel like I'm seeing more in the source picture, but can't capture what I want to capture, yet. 

I think my recent cat painting turned out better, since I feel like I have a better "understanding" of cats as a subject matter (especially my cats), since I've painted so many of them.  

#256 Minnehaha Creek Scene - 8" x 10" 0 paper 

Since it's tomato season and the rest of the week is going to be busy, my plan for the week is to do some 10-minute tomato paintings. 

A Good Ending To A Busy Work Week

I mostly kept up my painting habit last week. It was both an accomplishment and a giant compromise. Most mornings before work, I spent only 2 minutes or so drawing out my next painting. I didn't do so well on the drawing front.

Friday, I got a break from the daily grind. I finished my morning work for a client early and had 1 1/2  hours free before my afternoon client work. One of the things I did with this bonus time was go to Wet Paint, since it's time to play with some new colors. Wet Paint is in the midst of the their back-to-school sale, so Golden Heavy Body Acrylics are 40% off. I don't recall how this compares to their usual price, but it was a good enough reason to stop in.

Meet my new additions.

I haven't decided if I will rotate them in, start another palette or what. I decided to purchase the Diarylide Yellow when I saw some paintings of another one of Kat's students. This student refered to it as "school bus yellow". While I will always have Quin Magenta in my palette, I decided that I would like to play with a red which is closer to orange. Being messy, I stayed away from any of the Cadmiums and went with Pyrrole Red Light. Based upon Patti Mollica's book, I purchased the Yellow Ochre to have a mineral or earth pigment to play and see what happens.

On Friday night, I did a quick value sketch and worked on the painting. The value sketch helped me slow down and tune into the value shapes. On Saturday, I finished up the eyes and whiskers. Since I was painting one of my orange cats, I added a tiny dab of the Yellow Ochre to my palette. It helped me get some orange-yellow colors which look closer to life without being muddy and made it easier to get some of the darker shades I wanted. Using a little bit in the purples, neutralized the purple without making them boring.

So many times I get overly fussy trying to get the right eye color, so I end up with multiple layers of paint in the eyes. This time, I was able to focus on the values and whether the color was clearer or muddy and just went with that. I must remember this in the future!

#255 - Chandler At Twighlight - 8" x 8" - paper

The background, whiskers, and eyebrows add nothing. I don't think the whiskers or eyebrows are needed at all. Even so, I really like this painting.

Translucence

How do you paint translucence? I have no idea, which is why I left this painting in this state for several days.

Tonight, I decided to go for it. I painted the background, let it dry, and roughly sketched in the wings. I decided to thin the paint with acrylic glazing liquid. I wish I had thinned the black paint at the top of the wings a bit more.  Still, I think this experiment worked. 

#254 - Hummingbird At Cabin Feeder - 8” x 8” - paper

Back At It

On Saturday, I took time to paint.

#253 - Rhode Island Gull - 8" x 8" - paper

I also took time to draw. It may look like the proportions are off, but in the picture the width of this person’s face was about 1/2 the length (which includes the beard).

Interesting

Where did the week go? For me, it flew by in a whirlwind of being busy - - a little too busy without enough downtime or restful sleep. I fought with feeling tired and a little overwhelmed all week and did not find the time or energy to draw or paint at all yesterday. While I might only spend 10 minutes total on these activities on a busy day, I always feel like I've missed an opportunity when I skip a day.

I slept in this morning. With that and the weekend, I feel much more refreshed.

Earlier in the week, I did several more value sketches. Three were of people from Skchy. The unfinished one was the start of one from a photograph of black raspberries and foliage in my yard. What was interesting was that I partially shifted over to "drawing a person" rather than drawing the value shapes and values. I didn't realize it until I was done. It takes a lot of mental discipline, at least for me, to stay in the world of shapes and value, which is why I think it's a good skill to hone.

The other thing I noticed is that it's easier to approach an activity with a "fresh mind" the first time I do it. When I try to do the same thing the next time, it's like my brain goes into a "been there and done that" state and it's hard to stay true to my self-imposed assignment.

In other art-related news, I finished my August Art 4 Shelter painting.

#252 - Sunset at the Cabin - 5" x 7" paper 

The things I like about this one are the paint colors, the sunset, and the implied boat. I didn't go "overboard" on putting in too many details of the boat. Once I was done with the painting, I could see that the direction of the paint strokes of the water would have worked better if they were more horizontal.

That Went Well

I have been doing my  daily, value sketches, but I've been doing them from life and that's making it hard to get the types of examples I need. Since the purpose is to figure out massing shapes, which means editing out details, plus deciding where to place the shifts in values, I decided to go the easy route last night. I finally signed up for Sktchy. It's only available on IOS, not Android.

For this sketch, I started with the shapes and value in the hand on the left and continued to draw shapes and values until I captured the person. The face should be a tad wider. Given that I drew it like puzzle pieces coming together rather than capturing the whole and filling in details, it's not bad. Actually, I'm surprised that the dimensions of the head were pretty good, given that I focused on the left arm and body first. Plus, the resemblance to the actual person is pretty good.

Even though I go off the deep end at times regarding values, it still is amazing to me that with 3 values and the shapes of those values, you can end up with a decent sketch or painting.

Now For Something Completely Different

Today is the first day to drop off articles for judging at the Minnesota State Fair. My friend and I are going later this morning. Standing in line is fun, since people are wiling to share and talk about the things they are entering in the Creative Activities building.

I am only entering one item this year, but it is the hardest knitting I’ve ever done.

It’s a style of knitting called brioche. I took a class with the Queen of Brioche, Nancy Marchant, when I went to Vogue Knitting Live in Minneapolis several years ago. She advised us to never knit brioche when you are tired. Since it’s tough to fix mistakes, it’s just easier to knit perfectly. She’s right.

I finished this scarf several weeks after last year’s fair. I placed it in a ziplock bag and placed it on the shelf until last week. I’m glad that I will finally be able to wear it this winter.

My Brain Is Going To Explode

I checked out the book, How To Paint Fast, Loose & Bold by Patti Mollica, from the library and started reading it this week. So far, it’s putting different concepts and pieces, I have been working on learning, and packages them all together. It covers a lot of material in a fairly small book, so I don’t think it’s the book for an absolute beginner. For me, the writing and visual examples are just enough for me to say “yes, yes, yes, I can see that”. Learning to do this will be a different matter.

I have barely started reading the book, but by page 20, there are some good, concrete examples about organizing and simplifying a scene. Much of this includes creating a value sketch with 3 values, massing shapes together, and using artistic license. On a micro level, there’s a good example about capturing values accurately in each element contained in a drawing, but not being too detailed. The writing and visual example drove home the point that when the various elements are broken into too much detail where each level of value appears in each element, it makes things too busy and awkward.  Duh. However, this surprised me because I never thought about it this way. I’ve been thinking (and struggling) with just trying to see and capture the values I see. It makes more sense that this is not enough and why you need to edit. There are also good examples about massing shapes together.

However, my head really wanted to explode when Patti touched upon taking artistic license in a macro way. One of the paragraph headings says it all that "Some Scenes May Require Significant Changes". In the example, it shows a picture of a farm house and barn on a hill which includes trees and a sky. In her value sketch, she does things like changing and lowering the angle of the hill, putting more emphasis on the barn, adding a silo, and changing the values to make it all more interesting.

What!?!  All of this is blowing my little rule-based, detail-oriented mind. It helps that the book goes on to say “If you are new to this process, be patient with yourself. Learning to simplify values is not easy, nor is it easy to teach".

I have been in a drawing drought and I think this book is my way forward. When I hit a plateau and couldn’t figure out how to proceed or improve, I mostly stopped drawing. In the last week or two, I’ve picked up a pen occasionally and done some very quick sketching and it felt good. Drawing in connection with painting, even with using grids, and the painting itself has meant my drawing skills did not completely vanish. In fact, I think I see some improvement. It’s similar to when I wanted to learn to juggle 4 balls, many years ago. Occasionally, I would try, but it never clicked. One day, I picked up 4 balls and I could do it. I think this happened because my brain was working out the details in the background. A little of this happened with my drawing, although I can’t really recommend avoiding an activity as a path to improvement.

When I stopped drawing daily, I think it was because of fear, which started in Roz's drawing class. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great class and I am so glad that I took it. Things beyond the line drawing did not stick and thumbnail sketches really freaked me out, since they are all about shapes, valued, and evaluating composition. Their importance made sense, but I was afraid of them and never embraced doing them. Since that time, I’ve danced around the issue. Her classes come with lifetime access, so I will loop back in the future.

Anyway, in the book, Patti talks about the importance of doing value sketches when she says “As artists, we make decisions visually, not theoretically”and she talks about artists as “visual composers”. I had a deep, visceral, “nope, that’s not me” reaction when I read that. All of this has helped me realize that I don't process things visually either very well or very easily. In talking to my hubby about this, he expressed some disagreement with this. I think for an accountant, I am a visual person. However the level needed to draw and paint does not come naturally to me and it can make me feel very tired very quickly.

As a result of all of this thought and melodrama, I have decided to embrace what this book is offering me. I am committing to a 30-day self challenge where I do at least one value sketch, limited to representing 3 to 4 values, focusing on massing shapes and trying to eliminate detail. If time permits, I'll do more than one version. My guess is that the first version will be mostly about capturing "reality". In subsequent versions, I would like to practice altering reality in order to try and create a better composition. My subject matter can come from life or from photos. I am both scared and excited about this. I am trying to embrace that it's going to be rough going, especially at first. Plus, I expect that it's going to break my painting and drawing for awhile. On the painting front, I am going to try and do a value sketch prior to painting and use it to, hopefully, make better decisions. I'm not sure how much or how often I'll post the value sketches.

When I went to do my first value sketches on Wednesday, my brain completely froze. I selected an outdoor scene and gave it a try, but got frustrated and didn't finish. Still, I got that first awkward try behind me. In the early evening when I had several minutes waiting for a friend to pick me up for a Fringe Festival show, I started a value sketch of my water bottle. I approached it as drawing the value shapes, not the bottle.

The next morning, I abandon an unfinished 4" x 6" painting of the cabin dock and canoe at sunset. Later in the day, I did a quick value sketch of the scene. I even edited out a lot of detail in the scene. The canoe and the water around much of the canoe were both the darkest dark, so it's hard to distinguish the two, but I left them as I saw them.

Today, I started to redraw this same scene on as 5" x 7" painting, since it's August and I haven't done my August Art 4 Shelter painting yet.

This evening, I spent 3-4 minutes doing a value sketch of my hubby's arm and part of his torso as he was sitting in a chair.

I'm not sure where all of this will lead, but after feeling stuck, especially in my drawing, it's good to have a new way to move forward.

Hummingbirds, More Hummingbirds

I am enjoying the hummingbird pictures that I took up at the cabin. Here are several more pictures.

I've also been painting hummingbirds. This one is okay. It was a postcard attempt, but I don't think I'll mail it. 

Cabin Hummingbird At Feeder - 4" x 6" - paper

For the third hummingbird painting, I cropped the picture so the bird was the emphasis. That worked better. Here is the start.

I will mail this one to Wet Paint.

I still can't get the luminous, vivid green that I want.When the light hits the hummingbird, some of the green just glows.

#251 - Hummingbird In Thought - 4" x 6" - paper

I have mailed one postcard so far, but I sent it to my friend as a thank you for the cabin weekend. He brought it to juggling club on Monday night, so I got to see it. It arrived in pretty good condition. There was a little tear and the one side of the shutters got rubbed off a bit.

They Aren't Crooked

In life, the shutters and window are not crooked, but in my painting they are. Still, I would be lying if I didn't say that I am absolutely thrilled with this painting. I did it for the postcard project at Wet Paint, so it's small.  There were a lot of details to fit into 4 inches by 6 inches. I used bright brushes in size 2, 4, and 6.

I did this over 3 days. Here is the progress after day 2.

Oops. Here's a break for a commercial announcement. Chandler the orange cat, who likes to walk on my keyboard, wants all of you to have a happy "bn bn bn bn bn bn" from him.

Here is the final painting!

#249 - Cabin Bedroom - 4" x 6" - paper

I added the bits of sky peaking through at the very end and it made the painting look much more grounded and real to me.

It's the best feeling when I've pushed myself and done the absolute best that I can for my current skill level, plus I end up with something that pleases me. It does not happen that often, but when it does the feeling is magical.

Background Change

I changed the background this morning. It's not great, but it's better than the old one, plus it makes the green look a tad brighter.

Also, I figured out that I have more time to submit postcards. The cutoff is 08/13, so I started another one. Here is the source picture which I cropped.

Here is the start.I might need to revise the where the pencil line denoting the corner on the left side. It makes the cabin look tilted.