Happy 4th Of July!

Have a fruitful holiday. Here are the pickings from this morning. I love that I have two types of raspberries and a small black currant on my small lot.

I finished a homework painting last night. I really need to get more painting done. This was from a picture from long, long, ago when Ella was a kitten. I would like to give it another try. In the picture, she is mostly dark, but you can see the tiniest bit of shoulder definition and I did not capture that in the way that I wanted.  Also, the scene outside was a little overwhelming. It's not clear to me how to paint a bunch to different shrubs, leaves, and so on. Next time, I would like to try capturing pools of value to see if that works better. I am pleased about her legs and paws on the right side. There was a tiny, tiny bit of window frame that showed between her paws.  Six months ago, I'm not sure that detail would have registered. Also, I like the light that reflects up on her chest on that side.

One of the things that I liked about Roz's class was that she was practically militant about how a person should talk about their art when they are sharing it, especially with peers. When we posted our homework, her rules were:

• Don't make excuses.
• Find and document one thing that you like.
• Critique and note one thing that you would like to work on or improve. This was supposed to be stated in a productive manner, so that it is something you can address. She talked a lot about the "editing eye" and/or the "fresh eye", which are both helpful versus the internal critic, who is not.

This has helped me. Although partly was a reminder to get back to a practice I started during my initial set of painting classes with Kat. At that time the gap between what I wanted to be doing versus what I could do was so vast that it could be painful. Very early and on my own, I decided to write one or more positive things about each and every painting. On an early one, I remember writing that I liked the color orange that I had mixed. It really did change how I was able to look at my own work. I did not get the critique part at that point, but it helped me accept where I was at and feel good about what I was doing.

I hope to get more sketching in today, but I did start my day with a 30 minute sketching session. As always, I liked the last sketch the best. 

It's a partial sketch. While the cat ended up too large relative to the lovely man, who was reading the newspaper, I enjoyed that I seem to be wanting to tackle multiple objects.  Two days ago, I sketched the two gray cats next to each other. In both cases, This was not a deliberate choice in either case. I feel good that my skills are getting to a point where I have more confidence to try multiple objects and figure out their relationship to each other. My guess is that I will continue to do a lot of single objects, but will start to mix in more complicated scenes.