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. 

Transition

The last two weeks of art class involved landscapes and pets.  Working on a landscape that I started, but did not finish, and one that I did finish brought back all my insecurities in a surprising way.  Given that and the end of class, I stumbled a bit, but pushed through to not lose the painting habit.  

Here is the landscape that I brought to class.  

The week had some unexpected demands on my time, so I only painted on Sunday and Friday and I rushed the ending to just get it done.  At the same time, one of the lessons from Kat really sunk in about squinting and look for big shapes.  When I was mostly done, I caught a glimpse of my photo across the room, squinted and saw that my reference photo was mostly made up of 3 sets of shapes from the greenery along the edge, the bowl of the falls and the falls.  I don’t think I tend to notice things with this type of cohesion and I think this will help as I continue to practice.  

Here are a couple of cat paintings. 

One thing I want to focus on is paint strokes!  When I’m doing simple objects like fruit, I like the blockiness I get a lot of the time.  With a complicated structure, I don’t know what to do.  So much to learn!  

One of the people in class mentioned copying paintings off of Pinterest and she had an owl painting.  I went out and pinned some cat and owl paintings and.want to work off of some of these to see what I can bring back to my paintings.  I’m not sure it’s appropriate to post a picture of the entire copy, so here’s a partial.  

It was a good learning experience.  I’ve never done this and think I could learn a lot.  

Best of all, I am still painting and will continue to post, but probably not as much as I did the first few years after I started.  

Try Harder Things

That is the theme of the next two paintings to share - - try harder things.  I remember the first time I tried to paint a cat.  I was slightly terrified.  The painting represented the best I could do at the time and I have always felt a tiny bit of pride when I look at that painting on this blog.  No one would say it was a good painting, but I faced my fear and did it anyway and that was the start of working to learn how to paint a better cat portrait.

I like buildings and structures and Brendon Farley’s paintings of scene of the streets and alley’s of South Minneapolis and I have been afraid to try doing that. 

One of the homework assignments for today’s class was to painting something from outside your window.  While I miss the tree that used to be in the alley next to my garage (and I wonder if it will impact my hummingbird sightings this year since that was the best place for a hummingbird to perch to guard two of my feeders), I do like looking out the kitchen window at my purple garage and across the alley to the neighbor’s house and garage.  I love color and the pop of the orange-red of the flat part of the neighbor’s garage is always fun to see.  

I took a picture of that, cropped it, and painted it and I felt a bit of that same rush from trying something that I am afraid to try and I think I found a little more freedom to keep trying paintings like this, so I can get better at them. 

One of the many challenges was how to make paint strokes interesting when you are painting a flat surface with straight edges like a garage door or all that sky, since I edited out some trees  I plan to ask Kat about that in class.  Also, how can I imply the boards of wood on my garage, instead of making them so obvious.  That’s just a few of the things!

Last week, I tried to paint the tiny glass bottle and an orange in Kat’s class and it was hard. She let me borrow it and I gave it a second try, which I think shows improvement from the first try.  I also had fun with the pepper. 

I have been painting most days, not every day, and I am so thrilled to be back at it.  It was a long and frustrating drought.