Red

I purchased a different red to use during next week’s class at the Grand Marais Art Colony with Adam Swanson. Quin Magenta has been my red. However, I decided that I wanted to try a color that was closer to a truer red (whatever that means), since it can be challenging to mix reds and oranges with Quin Magenta.  It’s doable, but it takes a little work.

I still wanted a red on the slightly cooler side, so I purchased Primary Magenta and, recently, added it to the palette as a replacement for Quin Magenta.  How differently this new color behaved surprised me and I am still recalibrating.

When I was painting a dark red pear, it was just as challenging to mix the reds I wanted, especially dark reds. It’s a beautiful color in its own way, but it has less oomph and pow to it.  I found myself missing Quin Magenta.

This tiny experiment enforces that:

1. There is no single perfect paint color or pigment.
2. Mixing takes work.
3. It is a good thing that it don’t need to mix the exact perfect matching color you truly want, since you won’t achieve that anyway.
4. In spite of #1, 2, and 3, color mixing can be amazing and fun.

Color mixing is a compromise.  Kind of sounds like life, doesn’t it? Value, value, value is where it’s at, but I absolutely love and adore color.

I like to post most of what I paint. It makes it easy to refer back, plus I don’t have to keep everything.  Here are some recent images.

These were painted with Primary Magenta as the red. For the one in the top picture, I did a better job of slowing down to really see the pear. I actually really like how the neutral, gray background helps the pear to glow. There are so many choices and sometimes you make good ones.

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Prior to doing these, I set up to do 4 timed 10 minutes of pear paintings with the Primary Magenta and painting over white gesso.  The timed paintings were abandoned after 2 attempts. Ugh. That was too much change. Next week in class, I am open and looking forward to painting over white and using more paint colors that are new to me.  I welcome it and expect to learn a lot. Working on my own at home playing with a new red color was enough change for me.

Here are some paintings with Quin Magenta during the painting class I took with Kat Corrigan that finished up in October.  

This top one was painted over black gesso.

Art 4 Shelter submissions can be turned in through April 17th.  I plan to submit a few things this year. Here is the first one and it’s from a photo I’ve used several times in the past. Someone in the recent session of classes used a palette knife to scrap and I did a bit of that.

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For the rest of November, my goal is to just keep the painting habit going. I have class next week and plans to be out of town for Thanksgiving with family. In December, I hope to set some specific goals so that I don’t have to think too much about what I want to do or work on. That allows procrastination to step in and I really don’t want to lose my momentum. I push myself towards more complicated and harder compositions. It’s time to stretch beyond just painting one object at a time. 

For Art 4 Shelter, one idea that popped in my head is to do several pieces around the idea of downsizing. I have some stemware and other things that I would like to get rid of and it might be fun to paint some of these pieces before letting them go.

Sunset View

In the last class with Kat, I went to trace this one out and I managed to have the tracing paper wrong side down. The photo was somewhat dark, which made tracing it a second time a tad challenging. I worked on this off and on and and finished two days ago. 

I really did want to abandon this one. There are so many choices to make and so much to learn.

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On a different note, I hate AI. When I look at my posts, there are way, way more views than there should be. In fact, I expect ZERO views. After Blogger stopped the automated email subscription service feature years ago, no one read my blog.  While I missed getting occasional comments from the few people who had subscribed, I still want to use this blog to document my journey.

If there is AI-related crap looking at my stuff, it's looking at everything, which of course I already knew before seeing the views for each post. It used to be that my knowing was theoretical. Seeing the view counts just makes it more real and VERY ANNOYING.

Finished Yesterday

I started this one during painting class and finished it yesterday. Setting the goal to finish this one this week helped, since it can be a lot easier to just hop off to start the next thing.

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Going Forward

The most recent session of classes with Kat Corrigan finished up on Saturday, so I am in the beginning stages of making my own structure, so that I can better keep a creative habit going.

Specific goals for the coming week are:

• To finish two pieces started in class, and 
• To copy several apple paintings done by other painters. 

I want to enforce the habit of finishing, since it’s way too easy to abandon a project and start a new one rather than see what can be learned from finishing. I am also interested in expanding my vocabulary of paint strokes.

The overarching goal is to support a daily creative habit.

There were a lot of takeaways from class. In no particular order, here are some of the things bubbling up. I don’t want to lose these.  I also want to go through my notes from the session and prior sessions and capture more of this and try to put it into practice. 

• Slow down to really see.
• Practice with thumbnail sketches.
• Squint.
• Talk out loud about what you see to try and override your brain.
• Keep experimenting with paint layers, but go back to stroke per color, timed paintings, or set number of paint strokes painting from time to time to recalibrate from getting too fussy. 
• Remember swirly paint strokes (think about Bev).
• Practice / focus on letting the black gesso show through in different ways (think about Kat, Joe, Bobby, and others).
• Background examples (think about Bobby and Joe)
• Look at pictures from class for composition ideas or ways other people seemed to approach this. 
• Value, value, value, including darker values of light colors.

I have also decided that I need a social aspect to this. While I don’t mind painting on my own in the basement, having a social aspect should help me keep going. I’m looking for a circle of people where we meet and share what we have done.  

Going back to the last art class, this is the other piece that I finished.  This one was done much more quickly than the cat painting in my last post, even though this one has so much more going on. I tend to shy away from more complicated scenes. There are so many decisions to make, but I want to try and start tackling harder and more complicated subject matter.  

I feel good about this one. I think I did a better job of making decisions as I worked through it. It looks a bit cartoonish to me, but it was a better job of tackling a scene than I have done in past.

Looking and Seeing

I am back in a session of painting classes with Kat.  She is such a good instructor and also is so generous in spirit and information. Tomorrow is the last session of a set of five sessions.

My wishes for myself are to keep the habit going and to slow down not just to look, but see. It takes so much more time to see and wrestle with your brain to trust your eyes and ignore your brain.

I struggle with wanting to jump ahead and get to the “fun” part of playing with the paint, but when I actually slow down to see the ending result is better. Remember that! Also, remember Kat’s suggestion to talk to yourself out loud about what you see to help override the brain.

A later goal is to work on more confident paint strokes and doing a better job of paint control (not too much or too little) on the paint brush. 

This one has a lot of layers and took quite a bit of time. I am so pleased with it. It’s the best likeness I've gotten of a picture.  It doesn't hurt that it's one of my orangies, Chandler. 

Sometimes when I’m finished, I can step back and say I did the best that I am capable of at this time and I feel that way about this one.

Back in 2016 when I attended my first set of painting classes, I remember feeling the same way about my first attempt to paint a cat. I remember feeling terrified to try and paint a cat. When I was done, I also felt a rush of pride for the attempt and at the time, also felt that it was the best I was capable of at the time. 

We all start where we are and thankfully with practice and some good instruction that starting point gets better over time.

Drawing Project

Yesterday when I read Roz’s blog post about projects, an idea flashed in my head to work on finishing one small, daily, quick portrait. I decided to make this a project. The plan is to spend 15 - 20 minutes per portrait and to shoot for 6 days per week. The overall goal is to get back to daily or almost daily creating. 

I started yesterday. Both the drawing from yesterday and today were done with a 6B pencil. I am using rather small paper and a dull pencil, so fine details are out. That makes it easier to “finish” a drawing.  

I am not posting the source photos, which come from the Museum app. For the top drawing, both eyes were looking up and I only got that with one eye. When drawing females, it’s hard not to “age” them. I really enjoyed trying to capture the shapes of her hair. 

Art 4 Shelter 2025

 I don’t have as any paintings as in the past, although I don’t think I did any last year. 

Here’s the one from the homework assignment from the latest session of Kat’s painting class.

I’ve still been working on copying paintings and one of the things I’ve been doing is copying some citrus paintings of Elena Katsyura.  She is on the web and Daily Paintworks.  I love the glow she gets.  I believe she is working in oil.  Given that and the limited palette, I am not getting that, but it’s been a fun exploration.  Here are two from life.  

The last thing to share is a quick drawing with my beloved Neocolor II crayons.  This is not for Art 4 Shelter.  I just wanted to do something this morning and didn’t have much time.  

The ground is from a mixture of color and pastel ground thinned with a bit of water.  It was a 15 minute or so quick study using one of the above pieces. It was fun, since I haven’t had the Neo IIs out for a long time. I am getting a knee replacement in a few weeks and wanted to have some easily accessible art materials to use as a I recover. 

The rind color needs to be a bit more distinct from the background.