Globe Amaranth In Vase

It's hard to believe that there are still some flowers in my garden outdoors. The globe amaranth has been blooming all summer and was still blooming yesterday. I picked one and put it in a vase.

I really, really wanted to minimize my paint strokes and was not successful with that. However, there are a number of things that I like, including the different greens for the vase and flower, the shadow of the flower stem on the vase, and the muted background versus the bright vase and flower. While the shape of the vase is not spot on, it does show where the vase had water. Also, the composition has a diagonal and an element that goes off the edge.

If this flower or the outdoor ones survive a few more days, I may revisit this.

Last Weekend's Painting Creation

Here is the table that I painted last weekend, plus a cat. The original table was a dull wood-brown color. I found it in the alley. I like the bright cheery color.

This table was taken apart, primed and painted with a satin latex. When the coverage was not very good, I switched to an enamel latex. The paint is not adhering very well. I'm going to try a polyurethane top coat and hope for the best.

I am also working on my drawing. After I drew the mug, I took a picture of it and looked at it in black and white to see how close my values were. It was pretty close. The nearest rim should be lighter. My eraser started smudging rather than erasing, so I left it.

Painting Class #4

Class goes for six weeks. The first four have seemed to fly by and I am going to miss the next one. Yesterday, we did a painting exercise where you do an entire small painting in ten minutes. That includes drawing it, painting the object, and painting the background.

The first time is intense. The time flies by and there just isn't enough of it! After that, I felt a little more in control. It's a good exercise in making choices quickly and doing rather than thinking. For my last attempt, I should have stopped at about nine minutes. I tried to fix something and made it worse. It's a good lesson in knowing when to stop.

We talked about composition in class yesterday. There were some good examples about how to draw your eye around a painting.

Painting An Egg Is Difficult

There are a bunch of layers of paint on this. It's still not very egg-like. When you are painting a relatively simple object, there is no where to hide!

One More Homework Painting

Painting was a bit challenging this week. There was an acute situation that kept the worried part of my brain pretty busy.  It was interesting to see/feel the impact that had on my ability to draw or paint. While it was still a good break and a respite, I didn't really fully get into the process this week and could not "see" as clearly.

Last week in painting class, we talk a lot about angles. Kat mentioned a trick where you think about a clock to figure out what direction a line is going.  Is it going at 3:00 or 4:00 and so on. I tried to incorporate that and think about that when I was drawing this week.

I can also see that I need to keep working on my drawing skills. I'm thinking about taking a drawing class this winter or spring.
  

Knowing When To Stop Is Important

The first painting is an example of taking a painting that had a few problems, trying to fix them, making it worse, and wildly trying to end up with something that even vaguely looked like the thing that I was trying to paint. It would have been better to stop and accept that it was a painting that had a few problems. Believe me, it was better at an earlier point.  Not good, but better.

The second one is better. This was a different mug and I got pretty close on the handle shape. It was very straight at the top and curved at the bottom.

It's been a tough week, My brain is a bit distracted and it shows. I'm glad that I had time to paint today and I am still enjoying mixing colors that whisper.

Limited Time

Because of a family situation, it may be hard to paint the next several days.

Today, I spent 8 hours in class for professional education credits. In the down time between sessions, I sketched my mug without a viewfinder. The handle on the lower drawing is closer to actual.

It was fun. I also like the fact that I can keep myself entertained with some paper and a pencil.

Finished!

It's done.

It's suffering a bit from MMS (misshapen mug syndrome), but I still like it.

Work In Progress

Yesterday, I got home from work early enough to start a painting, but not to finish it. Here is the approximate set up.  I'm still not very good at taking a picture from the exact same angle, as my drawing. On purpose, the handle was positioned so that it's harder to draw and capture.

Here is the drawing.

Finally, here is the painting in progress.

I am very pleased with the pepper. It was not over-worked or take a gazillion layers of paint like I so often need.  Also, it feels good to be able to mix a good red color!! Rather than focusing on one part of the painting, I took turns working on the cup, the pepper and the background. This was one of the recommendations from class last week and I finally "heard" it. The mug needs some work. With the lighter colors, I need another layer of color, so I'll play around with it tomorrow.

Tried It. Didn't Like It.

Yesterday was a busy, busy, busy day. I did a lot of non-art related painting. This time, it was the replacement storm door for the back. It needed to be primed and painted, plus it has a separate glass insert and screen insert. Both sides have to be painted and it needed two coats. If that's not enough, I also started painting a round wood table that I picked up in the alley. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm up to priming the thing and putting on two layers of paint. It's going to need at least one more, plus a sealer of some type.

I also squeezed in a leaf painting. I picked up a bunch of leaves when I worked on putting my community garden plot to bed.

The picture was taken at night without any natural light. The colors are richer in person. I decided to try painting in black lines using the gesso to "add back" the veins of the leaves.  Tried it. Really don't like it. It looks unnatural. I used a small brush. It might have worked better with a larger brush, since my cat whiskers are getting better.

I have enjoyed noticing leaves and trying to paint them. I think I'm ready to take a break from them. I did try taking several pictures, so I can try again later in the winter.

Colors That Whisper

Yesterday was the third painting class. We painted mugs and most of us had time to do two paintings. There was a lot of good discussion about drawing, angles, and shape, which I will think about and revisit this week.

Here is my first mug. I was drawn to it, since it was a nice dark blue color and I don't play with the blue paint as "blue" very often. It had a wide rim.

I was drawn to the second mug and actually borrowed it for the week. There are two things that I liked about it. It's shape (which I did not capture very well in my painting) and it's color. It's odd to be drawn to essentially an off-white mug. The colors in it whisper. They don't shout and mostly I am drawn to colors that shout.

Getting to these colors was a circuitous path with lots of layers, but I am pleased with them and I'm excited about being able to revisit this mug.

Constructive Self Talk

Yesterday was a day to work around the house on fall chores, rather than do paying work.  I started the day with a quick painting. The rest of the day involved raking, cleaning up the garage, and other fun things like that.

When I was drawing the leaf, my mind was in "the zone". It just happens some times.  What I noticed as I was drawing was that the running commentary in my brain was constructive. My unconscious thoughts were things like "is that the angle of that line or is that line about the right length?". I wasn't even seeing a leaf in front of me.  I was seeing shapes that needed to be captured.  Boy, I wish that happened all of the time or at least more than it does. Currently, it's about once per week and it always feels as though I'm getting out of the way of myself. I'm not fighting myself. I'm just doing. Hearing the useful self-commentary was a new experience.

Here is the leaf. The picture is not at the same exact angle.

Here is the drawing, pre-shadows.

When it came time to paint, I decided to use alternative colors. I still ended up with a lot of layers of paint. It's a problem. I can start with a good paint stroke, but it's too translucent. Frequently when I go over it to get a opaque color, I lose the goodness of the original paint stroke.  Also, don't get me started on the background color. Blech! On the plus side when something did not work or I reached a decision point and wasn't sure that to do, I stopped, got up from my chair, walked around, and came back. It made me feel more in control (which of course, I am) and not so frantic.

I've been experimenting a bit more and that is a good thing. When I fed the cats their evening meal last night, I was reading Carol Marine's book "Daily Painting". She said "If you want to be good at anything,  you've got to put in the time.......You've either got to do five hundred paintings, or put in ten thousand hours before you start doing work you can be really proud of". I find this comforting, although I don't totally agree with the thought about pride.  I think that she is talking about pride coming from attaining a certain level of mastery. Even though a lot of what I do does not work and I may not like the result, frequently, I step back and feel great pride in what I am accomplishing right now. 

Two More Leaves

Last night, I had extra time to paint, so I did two paintings. For the first one, the leaf was a simpler shaped maple leave with less color variation. It was hard to paint!

For both of them, I wanted a darker background to try and make the leaf glow. I enjoyed mixing up the purples for the backgrounds.  As much as I love purple, I don't seem to paint with it much. I also tried going with dots/dashes for my paint strokes. To get enough color in the leaves, I had to go over them a lot,

It's been a good challenge to try and paint leaves.  One of the things that I'm finding is that it's hard to top Mother Nature.  She does an incredible job "painting" her leaves. I've been finding myself stopping to look at individual leaves more this fall. Earlier this week when I went out to get the morning paper, I was blown away by the beauty of some of the hostas in my front yard. Currently, some of them have striped leaves with striped green (both dark and light), yellow, and cream.

Homework Leaf

Last night, I decided to paint on a board, rather than paper.

The colors in the leaf are the best part of this one. There are some good oranges and reds up there and most of the time, I find those hard to mix. I wanted brighter, clear tones in the leaf.  This is the second time for painting this leaf and the values are better than the first time.  The paint strokes are blah and I really don't know what to do with the background.    

Value - What's My Problem?

Since the second painting class, where I had several value failures, I've been thinking about this. The concept seems simple.  It involves translating colors to gray and evaluating where they fall on a scale from white to black. In representing the 3 dimensional aspect of an object in only 2 dimensions getting the values represented correctly (or close to correctly) is critical. To keep it simple in class, we were trying to separate an object into only 3 values, light, medium, and dark.

I see two problems.  When I look at an object, I tend to zero in on this part and that part and later still another part, over and over again. I'm not good at seeing the whole object at one time. The follow up problem is that it's hard to decide at what point to move from one category to the next. If it's in the middle, is it light or medium or is it medium or dark?  It's silly, but I find it hard to make those distinctions. It feels as though these problems go hand in hand with each other.  My eyes and brain are jump around in a crazy loop from here to there and there to here. I overload my brain and don't get the information that I need.  

Great, I just thought of another problem. There's that tricky thing that I encountered with the donut in class. Yet again, my eyes and brain are liars. The brown part on top of the donut read as darker to me, since it was brown and the white at the bottom of the donut read as much lighter, since it was light.

This probably sounds more frustrating and annoying than it actually is. The need to identify some of my own problems and road blocks is actually sort of fun. I plan to keep plugging away, so that I can improve.

Here is yesterday's painting. I did not have much time to paint.  Because of that, I rushed and only followed the squinting rule.

Homework Assignment For The Week

This week's homework assignment is to paint a few leaves.  The problem is how to choose?  They are all so seriously beautiful.

The maples one street away just glow.  It won't last long, since they are dropping a lot of leaves.  I picked up these lovelies in about 2 minutes and found that I had to stop after that.  Otherwise, I might have come home with an entire bucket of them.

Too Much Painting

Yesterday, I did way, way, way too much painting.  Most of it involved getting ready for winter. I put touch up paint on two door jams and scrapped and painted two boards on the north side of the house, which were peeling..

Earlier this fall, we had our front steps replaced.  Any day now, the hand rail might be installed.  I needed to scrape, prime and paint around the new steps.  This side was easy, since it was mostly painting new wood.

On this side, I needed to use a heat gun to get the many layers of old paint removed.  Painting the new post was a lot of work.  Of course, I was the one that wanted it to mirror the posts between the windows on the front porch. The facing boards are cedar, so I'll wait until next spring to paint those.

Between all of it, I used 4 different colors of exterior paint.  It all got done, but it was too dark to take a picture.

Oh yes, I also painted this. I mostly worked on it when I was waiting for the primer to dry.

My donut looks like a doughnut!  I also wrote down 3 rules that I intend to follow this week.  While painting:

• Stop and squint at least 3 times.  
• Back up and look at the painting at least once. 
• Flash eyes between the painting and subject matter at least once.  

The backing up and squinting is something that I've been hearing from Kat since I started taking lessons. Most of the time, I do okay with squinting, but sometimes I forget to do it!.  The other two, I don't really do. In class, I've noticed that most of us have not been stopping and taking a break.  

I think it's another brain-thing, like the paint stokes.  It was really, really hard to do paint strokes from side to side, the second time that I painted the tomato, even when I wanted to do exactly that. I want to stop. I want to take a break. I want to see the values, but in the middle of painting it's hard to do.

In order to form some new, better habits, those are my painting rules this week. I wrote them on an index card and hung it up in my painting area.     

Second Painting Class and Frenemy

 Sure, it looks friendly enough, but it can be troublesome.  

Yesterday was the second painting class. Everyone selected an object or objects to do a value sketch and subsequently paint those items or different items.  Rather than doing fruit, I picked two small powder-sugar donuts. As frequently happens when I try a new object, I really don't "get it", especially at first.  

The picture above is from home, so the sugar has redistributed itself.  When I was trying to do a value drawing, the main donut had a big brown area on the top that drifted down the side and a lot of white on the lower half of the front.  It was frustrating.  I got caught up in the colors and was not seeing the values.  I shaded the brown part darker, because it's brown, and the white part lighter, because it's white.  As a result, the donuts was flat and had no shape.  Also, the composition left a bit to be desired!  Kat stopped by and nicely pointed out that I should look more closely at the values.  The brown was not as dark as I had shaded and so on.  After reworking the drawing, it's better.  

I've been working at seeing values and it was a bit frustrating to so thoroughly not see them!  At the same time, it was a very good lesson.  In most cases when I paint something from life (not a picture), the object is mostly one color, so this hasn't come up.  In Kat's demo painting, she showed us how she marks the transition spots where there are major changes in values.  It's all about the values!  

For the painting, I changed where the donuts were positioned, slightly. 

The smaller donut does not work.  The larger one has a better shape than the drawing.  Staying with all muddy colors is so not me.  I like bright saturated colors, so this was a fun experiment.  However, I had trouble with my values, again.  When we looked at our paintings from far away, the different colors that I used just got lost. 

I brought home my two frenemies and also brought home one of their buddies, as well.  I want to try and paint donuts at least one more time this week. 

A Better Tomato

Work wrapped up a little early yesterday, so I took the time to do a quick painting.

I decided to try the tomato with paint strokes mostly going from side to side rather than up and down. While the color of the tomato is split between being side to side and up and down, the shape seems better defined side to side.  The other experiment was to use a lot of the glazing liquid when I was painting the background.

A day when you are happy with something that you've created is so much better than a regular day!

It Was A Good Night

Painting can be such a weirdo, weirdo brain thing.  Every now and then, my brain is in the right time and place and it all is so much easier than at other times.  It doesn't mean perfection or a good result. It just feels different and the process works better.  It was especially strange that it happened last night, since I was tired.  

My first painting went okay, but I erased a lot as I was drawing my subject.  That was ridiculous since my model was a green tomato.  Drawing it shouldn't require the use of an eraser, when I am using a viewfinder with grid lines and a surface with grid lines. When I was done with the tomato painting, I decided to do a second painting and revisit the garlic.  For that one, I didn't fret.  I just drew. While doing both paintings, I didn't think. I just painted.  It felt good. 

For the tomato painting, the thing that I like best is the position of the tomato.  It's just a tomato, so it's not a super exciting painting.  However, positioning it in the lower right corner makes it much more interesting.  Also, I am happy with the color of the tomato and the stem.

For the garlic painting, I decide to paint the stripes of the garlic.  I decided to use a different shape of paint stroke for the background, but played with keeping  the values of the garlic and the background fairly close just to see how it would turn out. It was a fun and I like the energy in this one. 

Apple

Here is yesterday's homework painting.  With the tips on Saturday about mixing the color red, my reds are getting better.

I was planning to leave blank space in between my paint strokes.  Somehow, that is not what happened!  Tomorrow, if I have time to paint, I need to slow down and give that a try.

Ralphie

I had a late afternoon work-related meeting in a coffee shop.  My client work before the meeting ended early, so there was time to do a drawing using values.

I need to keep doing this!  It's fun. It's quick and it's a good way to learn.  I can see some areas where the values could be tweaked, but I'm going to move on.  The light I was working in wasn't the greatest.

Two More Homework Paintings

Yesterday, I got home from work a bit early, so I did two quick homework paintings. The garlic was first.

I also did a lemon.  There was better light for the garlic picture than the lemon picture.

For both of these, I like the colors, but both backgrounds are a bit boring. Also, I feel like I am over-painting.  Tomorrow, I want to try something different.  Either I will try to leave a little background showing next to each stroke or I might go dotty or dashy again.

A Better Pepper

This is yesterday's painting.  I may or may not give this one a third try.  It might become part of dinner tonight, plus I have some heads of garlic that I would like to try. The values of this one are better than yesterday's version.  Yesterday, I went a little too dark with my colors (again).

Pepper Painting

This week's homework is painting fruits or vegetables.  This pepper has an interesting shape and was in the refrigerator. I painted this yesterday.

I finally can paint a lighter in value background!!  It's amazing how much white you have to use. 

Fall 2016 Painting Class

The first class was yesterday. The group includes two of my best buddies.  The first exercise was to paint a color wheel.  This is probably the truest red that I have ever made, since my starting color is more magenta than red.

It's good to know how to mix a truer red. I had been thinking about buying a different red to play with and now I don't need it. My guess is if I expand with even one additional color, I will want to go crazy and buy lots and lots of additional ones. There is so much to learn and I think it is better to focus and learn with the five colors I have.

The next exercise was to paint a piece of fruit.  I picked a tomato.

I have been painting from pictures so much, it was weird using a viewfinder. It is a wonderful tool, but it drives me a little crazy trying to hold it at the same angle in the same place, in order to draw accurately.

Leaf

Fall colors are so pretty.  I once based a cardigan on the colors of a fall tree with a blue sky.  

When the maple trees one block over start to turn, I would like to paint some leaves. Tonight, I drew some leaves that I had pressed the leaves flat.  This one that turned out the best.  It was drawn without looking 95% of the time.  The left side is better.  I wonder if that's typical for right-handed people?

Painting classes start tomorrow morning!!!

The Biggest Change Since 01/01/16

I have been doing at least one contour drawing each day since 09/16/16.  It's been good practice.  For the next 30 days, I'm thinking about trying to do a simple sketch each day.  The goal would be to capture the barest bit of form or essence of an object.  This might be a quick sketch or just a couple of quick simple lines. I tend towards the fussy details of things, so this would be a good way to stretch myself.  

What I like about all of this and the biggest change since the beginning of the year is that I am not afraid to pick up a pen, pencil, or paint brush and trying. That feels really, really good.

Fall painting classes with Kat Corrigan start on Saturday and I am really excited! When I first took her class this spring, all of the information was so new. I learned a lot, but just could not take it all in!

What A Difference The Light Makes

I painted and took a photo of yesterday's painting at night.  I tried to get decent light for the photo. Here is yesterday's picture.

 
I thought that the painting looked better in person.  On a whim, I took another picture this morning with indirect, natural light.  What a difference it makes!!

Water Lily - Revisited

I have painted from the same water lily picture several times.  For this time and the last time, I drew it out, rather than traced it.  I'm willing to do that for some of the simpler water lilies.

This painting is an 8" x 8".

It's a really great feeling to step back from a painting that you've done and think "I like that".

Bad Painting. Bad, Bad Painting.

In honor of the bad, bad painting from Saturday, here is a contour drawing.