January and February Paintings

Here are some paintings that I did in January and February, in addition to doing a lot of trees!

I purchased a basic set of acrylic paint that included blue, red, white, black, and yellow, some inexpensive student brushes (brights from size 4 to 8).  The surface was heavy paper (100 pound) in a spiral notebook.  The paper was 6 inches square.

I used artist's tape to create a frame around each piece of paper and prepped the paper with black gesso paint.

In painting class, we did not use black paint.  In both the above painting and the one below, I get why. It looks too harsh.  Dark grey or brown works much better.  In my knitting life, I used to love how colors looked next to black yarn.  One of my favorite all around creative people, Kristin Nicholas had a lovely dark brown yarn in her yarn line and used this in lieu of black in many of her designs.  She mentioned in her blog or in an article that black and white yarns tend to sell the most, but that she did not use them much in her knitting designs.

I still have a long way to go on capturing shadows, but at least I've improved from my first several attempts!

One time I tried to loosely recreate a picture from the newspaper.

I was happy with the result.

Towards the end of February, I quit painting and waited for painting class to start!