PIANPS And PAH

I was out of town over the weekend, but wanted to keep up painting regularly and also wanted to work on homework for the new session of painting classes. PIANPS stands for painting in a new place syndrome. Three of these paintings were done while I was staying at my Aunt's home. While I was careful with my set up and brought my own double layer of plastic to protect the table, I never settled into feeling comfortable. My Aunt was great. It was me. I was a bit fretful, even though, I've never had a paint disaster. Also, the best place to set up had terrible lighting.

We got home early enough that I did a painting at home (PAH) last night. Ah, the comforts of home! I paint in an unfinished corner of the basement, so I have no worries.

Here they are (#200 to #203), painted from 04/20 through 04/23. In the pictures, they are arranged with #200 in the upper left-hand corner going clockwise. #203 was painted at home.

While the paint / brush management is going better and I am enjoying mixing shades of red, all of these are overworked. I liked this apple because it had different and distinct sides. However, I also made things hard on myself, since my "model" was a really dark, Red Delicious apple. I like the dark, dark, purply red of these apples, but it's still a challenge to see the value differences in life. It's getting better and I need to keep working on this.

I find #202 (lower right corner) to be the most interesting and I think the main apple body in #203 (lower left corner) was pretty close to the actual apple.

Another thing I want to work on is the direction of my paint strokes. This might be intuitive for some people, but not for me. When I see a value shape, I'm often at a loss to figure out the best direction of my paint strokes to build / represent the shape. Also, I know that this is another area where some variety is needed.

After class is done, I might do some apple paintings, where one is done without thinking about it, one is done with all horizontal strokes, one with vertical ones, and so on. In fact, it might be interesting to work on two paintings at the same time by deciding which direction is better and doing that on one painting and going the other direction on the other painting.

I like this idea. I wrote it down in my book, so I remember it.