Sometimes My Brain Operates At The Same Level As A Fruit Fly

I have been known to tell people, "sometimes, I'm smart, but sometimes I'm that other way". I asked Google, "what creature has the smallest brain" because I was so mad at myself for how I started this painting. After deciding that I was going to slow down at the start, be deliberate about my goals for all new paintings, and document what I hoped to accomplish before picking up a paint brush, I found myself well into this painting before I remembered all of those good intentions.

Guess what? This painting started out poorly. I ended up covering up most of it with gesso and putting it away for a day. When I returned, I thought about what I wanted to accomplish, documented it, and mostly started over. For my last painting, everything just worked and I never felt as though I was fighting myself or the painting. I never got to that place with this one. In fact at times, I think I was trying to paint a cat, rather than paint shapes and values. However, starting again and setting intentions made for a better outcome than I expected given this one's rocky beginning.

Other than remember to start effectively, my takeaway from this one is is seeing and painting the rounded triangle of the inside lower part of each eye.

It's the end of the month of painting cats. For the next month, I need to mix it up and step outside my kitty, comfort zone. It was a good month. The painting notebook should help me going forward. I saw improvement in painting cat eyes. I worked on making my values more distinct (thanks to the Ipad and Value Viewer). I made some discoveries in mixing paint colors.

Still Drawing

I am still drawing every day, but have not been as disciplined with my practice. Here is a quick sketch from Saturday night of my replica, Galapagos tortoise. Figuring out how to show the shell, in terms of volume, depth, and markings is a challenge!

Confession

I like to paint. This seems obvious, but I mean something specific. The deciding, planning, drawing, mixing, and so on are all perfectly fine things to do, but what I like best is applying paint to a surface. At the last demo Kat did, I noticed that she seems to spend more time thinking about where a paint stroke goes or mixing the right color than actually putting the actual paint on the surface.

I've been thinking about this, but was also distracted and a bit frantic getting ready for out-of-town visitors last weekend. Now that things are quieter, I decided to put this to practice and, also, to start keeping a painting notebook. To keep track of my paintings in the notebook, I randomly decided that this one is #143. Before I put any paint on a surface, my goal is to write several intentions for the current piece. This should also help slow down the process a tiny bit. Most times, I just start and I don't think that serves me very well.

There were two goals for this one. While the background of this picture was dark, the lighting on the cat's face was dramatic. I wanted to play up or, at least be, true to the values by having a stark distinction between the lights and the darks. I also wanted to have bigger and bolder paint strokes.

One thing I learned was that mixing browns or oranges tending towards brown requires quite a bit of blue.

Background

The cat theme continues! This month, I've been thinking more about backgrounds. There's all of this space. While it's not the focal point, it is important too. Many times the actual background from life does not work, so you have to decide what to do and move forward. Most of my cat backgrounds this month have had a strong color and it's been fun deciding what color to use and how to shift the values to denote the light. Last night, I decided to go in a different direction and experiment.

When my cats are in the kitchen, frequently, the background is a striped, flat pillow. The fabric is busy and from time to time, I try a different way to represent it.

On this one, I had to do the eyes twice. I painted over the first attempt. The picture really captured her eyes and I'm not sure that I captured it. Still, the intensity of her look / stare is there. I also painted over much of my original colors. At first, my colors were too blue-gray. While both of my gray cats have a warm, blue undertone to their fur, I tend to over do it. When I thought I was almost done, I mixed some grays which were more neutral. To my eyes, these grays are actually a tad ugly when they are on the palette or the brush. The color looks sickly to me, so I was hesitant to use it. On the black gesso, I liked how they looked so I toned down some of the blue gray tones. I must remember this for future reference!

It's A Trend

It's another cat. I mostly finished this one last Thursday. I had family in town visiting from Thursday evening to Monday evening, so I didn't get back down to finish this until today.

Wingnut is a dark brown tabby and I have trouble figuring out how to mix colors that look right. This cat is a real character and he photographs beautifully.

Another Cat

I have family coming to visit this weekend. The more typical / normal housecleaning that this would inspire turned into a frenzy to to really, really get the house clean, driving me to the craziness of doing things such as mopping every single floor in the house and vacuuming the fronts and backs of all of the area rugs. Why is this relevant to this blog? I've been scheduling short painting breaks here and there as a way to recharge and keep my sanity.

I finished this painting this morning.

I thought that it was finished last night. When I looked at it right before I was going to take a picture, I saw two things that bothered me, so I made several minor tweaks. It was interesting. I wonder if anyone else would even notice the things that bothered me and I wonder if anyone else would think that the changes improved the final outcome.

It might be a good practice to get a painting 99% done, put it aside, and come back to it a day later to finish it. For some reason, my eyes need the rest in order to really see. I should not be surprised by this. For two years, I worked in the national office of a large CPA firm and 90% of my job was writing and editing. I quickly learned that I needed to take a 2-hour or longer break between the time that I wrote something and the time I could effectively proofread it. If I had to proofread my own work sooner than that, I found that I was reading what I wanted to see, not what was on the actual page. Why should it be any different for looking and evaluating something visual, but not based in words?  Also since I try to proofread these blog posts right after I write them, I shudder to think of the many, many errors that I miss.  Ah, the perils of a semi-perfectionist.

The owner of this cat is a good friend.  This cat is very elderly and is having some significant health issues. I felt compelled to a paint a picture of this cat from a picture taken a year ago when she was healthy.

Completed

I completed this one. When I was mostly done on Friday, I was not happy with it. At first, my thought was just to move on. However, I decided that trying to "rescue" a project was a worthy skill and one that I should develop.

I finished it today. While it does not look like the cat I was trying to paint, it turned out much better than the original version and than I originally expected.

I am still keeping up my daily drawing, although it's not been 30 minutes every day. Frequently, the house cats are my drawing subjects. For a long time, I was a bit obsessed with drawing ears and most of my sketches started with them. In the last few days, I've been focusing on and starting with noses and spending time with cheeks and chins. Some good things are happening with this.

Another Revisit

Yesterday, I painted the background. Today, I meant to paint the shapes, colors, and values of the bird. Instead, I painted the bird.

Here is the same scene from when I painted it in April 2017. 

It's All About Value

I mentioned all of this several days ago, but I want to reiterate it. Thursday's meeting was helpful and it was also energizing. It helped to look other people's work. I think all of us in "the club" are improving. It helped to watch a painting demo. It helped to talk about values. Homework for the month of September is mostly about values.

Both with painting and with knitting, I can get into this unhelpful loop where I don't make my values distinct enough. As previously mentioned, I have a bad habit of not making my darks dark enough and my lights light enough. On Thursday, I asked if it was cheating to use Value Viewer, an iPad app. It has a mode where it divides a picture into light, medium, and dark. I want to get to the point where I can see this for myself or at least mostly without a crutch. The feedback that I got was that it's not cheating and it should help with developing an eye for seeing values.

It might sound silly to ask "permission", but I don't what to go down a path that makes it harder to learn what I want to learn in the long run. In the first set of group painting lessons that I took with Kat Corrigan, she strongly encouraged drawing the items you are going to paint rather than relying on tracing paper. In the short run, it was harder and it could be frustrating, but it was great advice.

As an aside, I started using grid lines. I really needed them and have come to rely on them. With all of the sketching, I probably should experiment with not using them or just marking the center of my surface. Writing this caused a mild wave of anxiety, which means that I should give this a try.

Anyway, I used Value Viewer for this painting and found it to be extremely helpful. It is easy to switch between the original photo and the mode which shows the 3 values.

Here is the reference phone, uncropped.

I painted from this same reference phone back in February 2017. This painting was an 8" x 8". The one from yesterday was 6" x 6".

In truth, I enjoy comparing yesterday's version to February's version, more than comparing it to the reference photo. It's fun to compare different versions with each other and see how my painting has changed. When I look at the reference photo, I can see some areas needing correction, such as the placement of her eyes. Plus, I still could work on getting the values better across the entire painting. I really like this picture, so I'll revisit it again.

State Fair - Sketching Experience #5

Yesterday was my last trip to this year's Minnesota State Fair. The real reason for going was to attend the show at the grandstand with my honey and some friends. I did take somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes to sketch in the animal barns. I sketched rabbits for a bit and switched to goats.

I did not try to complete any sketches. I just wanted to practice capturing animal shapes. This turned out to be a good goal, since none of my subjects were asleep which meant that they moved from time to time.

Here is my favorite bunny sketch. I noticed this rabbit because of how it had its paws folded.

Here is the start of a goat sketch. I'm not sure the outline around the face was effective, although there was a clear ridge on the goat's face. It was an interesting looking goat. Actually, I found that I really liked sketching goats. Plus I liked that when I was focusing on a goat in one pen, a goat in the pen beside or behind me would come over to see if I had any food that I wanted to share with a goat.

I love the fair and sketching out there gave me one more way to enjoy the experience.

There Are Some Issues

There are some issues with this one, including multiple issues with the eyes.

The biggest positive is that I finished it. I started if a week or two ago, didn't like it, and put it aside, which I've done with several recent paintings. It's not a good habit to get into. At last night's meeting of my painting group, I decided that I would loop back and finish these pieces.

Last night's meeting was very helpful. I asked a few questions, picked up some pointers, and got useful feedback. We meet again in a month and the overall theme is to really focus on values. For some reason, I tend to wimp out and my lights aren't every light enough. This month, I'm going to really try and go for it and maybe even go for extreme, stark differences between the darkest darks and the lightest lights.

I'm really excited to see what the coming month will happen in my painting practice.